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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

OR THE PHYSICAL RELATIONS OF 
THE BRAIN TO THE MIND 



BY 

WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON, M.D., L.L.D. 

PHTSICIAN TO THE ROOSEVELT HOSPITAL; CONSULTING 
PHYSICIAN TO NEW YORK STATE MANHATTAN HOS- 
PITALS FOR THE insane; CONSULTING PHYSICIAN TO 
taSj NEW YORK RED CROSS HOSPITAL; FORMERLY 
PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE AND OF 
DISEASES OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, NEW YORK 
UNIVERSITY MEDICAL COLLEGE ; EX-PRESIDENT OF 
tHE NEW YORK ACADEMY OP MEDICINE, ETC. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1907 



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COPYKIGHT, 1906, BT 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
Published, September, 1906 



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Pbinted in America 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PACTS 

I Historical Introduction . . 1 

II Account of the Physical Basis op 

THE Mind . . . . .32 

III Brain Weight and Mental Faculty 48 

IV Significance of ihji. Bxiain Being a 

Double or Paih Organ . . 60 

V The Faculty of Speech . . .75 

VI The Faculty of Speech — Continued 104 

VII Evolution of a Nervous System . 130 

VIII The Brain and Personality . . 173 

IX Practical Applications . . . 234 

X The Significance of bLEEP . . 278 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

CHAPTER I 

HISTOEICAL INTEODUCTIOlSr 

Thekb is no more interesting subject in 
science than the physical conditions under 
which we become thinking beings. Though 
science is concerned with the knowledge 
which comes from investigation and experi- 
ment in the physical world, yet she cannot 
evade being questioned about the relations 
of matter to mind, because the bodily organ 
of the mind is a thing of physics. Hence 
however discussion about mind may be 
waived as pertaining to the province of meta- 
physics this cannot be done with that collec- 
tion of matter which is called the brain. In 
it mind and matter come together, and there- 

1 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

fore we cannot help asking how much the one 
is dependent upon the other. 

As far as the mind is concerned, it must 
be admitted that no study of its own opera- 
tions can give the least inkling on this ques- 
tion, any more than a study of the words of 
a telegram would reveal how a wire came to 
conduct them. The passage of thought in 
the one case and of words in the other are 
equally invisible. But the wire can be fol- 
lowed up until it connects with a mechanism 
which generates the words for the wire to 
transmit. Can any analogous result be ex- 
pected from an examination of the physical 
mechanism through which the mind acts? 

The answer is that something of the kind 
seems to be assured by modern discoveries 
of definite relations between particular por- 
tions of brain matter and thought. That 
there are certain material seats of purely 
mental functions in the brain is now demon- 
trated beyond mistake by the fact that when 
these are physically disorganized their spe- 

2 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

cial mental functions are forthwith abolished, 
though all other places in the brain remain 
intact. 

It is significant, however, that these dis- 
coveries relate in the first instance to the 
working of the brain of Man in distinction 
from the brains of animals. Restricted to 
the brains of animals which they could ex- 
periment with, physiologists would have 
been but little able to determine what special 
relations the brain held to thought. But 
with the brain of man it has proved to be 
wholly different, because, unlike animals, man 
possesses a faculty which is directly related 
to thought, the great faculty of speech, and 
the specific anatomical seats of speech have 
been found in the human brain as certainly 
as the ticker is found in its place in a tele- 
graph office. 

It should be remarked, however, that it 
was reserved for physicians and not for 
psychologists to light upon these great dis- 
coveries by their observing what may be 

3 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

termed the effects of experiments with the 
human brain which disease makes for them. 

While it has been a distinct gain for psy- 
chologists to leave metaphysics and turn their 
attention to the general physiology of the 
nervous system, the criticism may be made 
that apart from the human brain the field of 
psychology is very limited as far as the rela- 
tion of mind to matter is concerned. A single 
very circumscribed injury to a place in the 
human brain may teach more on this subject 
than a survey of the whole domain of nervous 
physiology in animals. This is well illus- 
trated by the fact that the identification of 
speech centers in the brain ere long led to 
the discovery, again by medical men, of the 
material seats of a whole series of other fac- 
ulties both sensory and intellectual; so that 
taken together these findings give to the 
subject of the physical relations of the brain 
to the mind an entirely new aspect. 

These discoveries, however, have all been 
made within the lifetime of our own genera- 

4 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

tion. On that account they are scarcely 
known to the general public, and their impor- 
tant bearing on the old question of matter 
and mind is even less appreciated. Few per- 
sons are aware how slow the progress of 
knowledge has been of the actual physical re- 
lations of the mind to the body, and hence an 
historical review of that progress would 
seem to be a fitting introduction to our pres- 
ent discussion. 

Thus the word brain does not once occur in 
the Bible, for the good reason that during the 
centuries in which its different books were 
written scarcely any one in the world sus- 
pected that this most silent and secluded of 
organs had anything to do with thought or 
feeling. With the Hebrews, the heart was the 
chief seat of the soul, while the mind was lo- 
cated in the kidneys, and all tender emotions 
in the bowels. Thus, one psalmist says that 
" His reins [kidneys] instruct him in the 
night seasons "; and another that " The 
Lord trieth the heart and the kidneys." 

5 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

The prophet Jeremiah denounces the hypo- 
crites of his day, who ' ' had the Lord in their 
mouths, but not in their kidneys." In keep- 
ing with similar expressions in the Old Testa- 
ment St. Paul speaks of " bowels of mer- 
cies." A survival of these conceptions is 
found in our English phrase, " Two fellows 
of the same kidney." 

Nor for a long time were the ideas of the 
Greeks on this subject much nearer the mark. 
It is true that Plato assigns the supreme seat 
of the mind to the brain, but how purely 
speculative were his views is illustrated by 
the following quotation: 

''The creation of bones and flesh was in 
this wise. 

" The foundation of these is the marrow 
which binds together body and soul, and the 
marrow is made out of such of the primary 
triangles as are adapted by their perfection 
to produce all the four elements. These God 
took and mingled them in due proportion, 
making as many kinds of marrow as there 

6 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

were to be hereafter kinds of souls. The re- 
ceptacle of the divine soul He made round, 
and called that portion of the marrow brain, 
intending that the vessel containing this sub- 
stance should be the head. The bones were 
formed by sifting pure earth and wetting it 
with marrow. It was then thrust alternately 
into fire and water, and thus rendered insolu- 
ble by either. As the bone was brittle and 
liable to mortify and destroy the marrow by 
too great rigidity. He contrived sinews and 
flesh, the first to give plasticity, the second to 
guard against heat and cold. Having this in 
view, the Creator mingled earth with water, 
and mixed with them a ferment with acid and 
salt, so as to form pulpy flesh, etc. ' ' ^ 

It is evident that Plato in this confounded 
the substance of the brain and of the spinal 
cord with the marrow of the bones, and thus 
got his conception of marrow as the founda- 
tion of the living body. But his younger con- 
temporary, Aristotle, circ. B.C. 335, who was 

* Jowett's Translation, vol. iii., pp. 339 sq. 362. 

7 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the foremost physiologist of his day, and him- 
self the son of a physician, scouted all this 
vital farrago of Plato 's, and as Plato evolved 
it all out of his own head, without troubling 
himself about facts, he had little difficulty in 
doing so. Aristotle examined the brain for 
himself, and came to the conclusion that its 
function had nothing to do with mind, but 
that it was a cool organ which properly re- 
frigerated the blood for the heart ! 

We may be tempted to smile now at this 
conclusion, but Aristotle was no mere theo- 
rist, and he reasoned according to a sound 
scientific method from facts as he knew them. 
We must put ourselves in his place, with 
nothing to go by more than certain patent 
facts of life, the explanation of which by 
other facts was then unknown to him. He 
found the brain an apparently insensible and 
inexcitable organ, while the heart was ex- 
tremely excitable. He therefore only fol- 
lowed his great predecessor Hippocrates, 
the Father of Medicine, who, recognizing 

8 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

how quickly consciousness is abolished by 
loss of blood, or deranged by blood poisons, 
or by the heated blood of fevers, inferred 
that the conscious mind resided in the blood, 
and hence that the heart, as the central organ 
of the circulation, was itself the chief seat of 
the soul. 

Another cause of misunderstanding was 
that, as the arteries are found empty after 
death, owing to their contractile walls ex- 
pelling the blood from them, it was con- 
cluded that these vessels carried air or 
ethereal spirits from the heart to the rest 
of the body. We shall see that nothing so 
contributed to delay for centuries all prog- 
ress as this mistake, by its suggesting the 
existence and all-pervading power of vital 
spirits. 

Supported by such great names as Hippoc- 
rates and Aristotle, these beliefs held sway 
for fully five centuries, along with specula- 
tions how from the blood the different or- 
gans of the body, such as the stomach, liver, 

9 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

spleen, intestines, etc., elaborated each its 
share of the various appetites or emotions. 

Meanwhile, in this wilderness of Greek 
speculation, a voice had been crying in vain 
the true doctrine about the brain long before 
Plato or any of the rest. Alcmseon, the Py- 
thagorean of Crotona, who lived about B.C. 
500, a man who was both an anatomist and an 
experimental physiologist, taught that the 
brain was the sole seat of the mind and the 
source of feeling and of movement, and that 
at the brain arrived all sensation by means of 
the nerves. It is evident that he was led to do 
this by noting that severing the optic nerves 
leading from the eyes to the brain produced 
total blindness. Unfortunately he called the 
nerves tendons, a term which, with its er- 
roneous suggestions, continued to be applied 
to them for two thousand years, until finally 
the great Descartes demonstrated the essen- 
tial difference between tendons and nerves. 
(Even Shakespeare when he spoke of nerves 
meant sinews.) 

10 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

But whether from AlcmaBon's colonial ori- 
gin, or because lie was far in advance of his 
time, both Plato and Aristotle, who must 
have read his works, alluded to them con- 
temptuously as '' somebody's " views. Ar- 
istotle, indeed, taught that the spinal cord 
had nothing in common with the brain, and 
evidently paid little attention to its "ten- 
dons " or nerves. 

In progress of time a great school of anat- 
omists and experimental physiologists arose 
in Alexandria, of whom Herophilus, circ. 
B.C. 300, and his contemporary, Erastistra- 
tus, were the chief, who carefully dissected 
the brain and traced to it the nerves of the 
special senses, as Alcmaeon had done. They 
went so far as to divide the nerves into those 
of sensation and of motion, though they were 
still hampered by Alcmaeon 's term " ten- 
don," and apparently they could not wholly 
shake off the authority of Aristotle as to the 
functions of the brain. 

They prepared the way, however, for Ga- 
ll 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

len, circ. A.D. 160, to whom we are chiefly in- 
debted for the overthrow of Aristotle's doc- 
trine about the brain, and the demonstration 
of its exclusive title as the seat of thought 
and feeling. To this great physician belongs 
the distinction of establishing this doctrine 
for all time. A contemporary of his, Are- 
taeus of Cappadocia, circ. A.D. 170, advanced 
so far as to recognize correctly that the brain 
dominated the muscular movements of the 
body by nerves, which, originating in the 
brain, crossed their tracts below in the form 
of the letter X, so that injuries in one 
hemisphere of the brain paralyzed the mus- 
cles of the opposite side of the body, while 
if they occurred in the spinal cord below the 
medulla, the resulting paralysis was on the 
same side with the injury. But even Are- 
taeus held that the seat of the soul was in the 
heart. 

After Galen the progress of discovery of 
the true functions of the brain was extraor- 
dinarily slow. From the middle of the second 
12 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

century A.D. to the middle of the nineteenth 
century, or 1,700 years, the actual gains in 
this knowledge were relatively most insig- 
nificant compared with the splendid advances 
in astronomy, geography, physical science, 
chemistry and geology. It would seem as 
if "to know thyself " scientifically rather 
than metaphysically, instead of being the first 
was destined to be among the latest of human 
achievements. 

One great cause for this backwardness was 
the persistent sway of teleology in all ques- 
tions about life. Men were ever trying to ex- 
plain the reasons of things by the imagined 
purposes of things, and to find the causes 
in the purposes. Thus we have seen that 
Plato's whole physiology originated in what 
he fancied the Creator and the gods intended 
when they made this or that part of the living 
body. And all the long way down the cen- 
turies we meet with examples of reasoning 
on these subjects not unlike that of the phi- 
losopher who admired the benevolent wis- 
13 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

dom of Providence in arranging that large 
rivers should flow past large towns. 

One of the greatest of these hindrances 
was the conception of the brain as a secret- 
ing gland, which dates from Hippocrates and 
continues down to Karl Vogt, Cabanis, and 
other writers in the earlier years of the 
nineteenth century, who maintained that the 
brain secreted thought just as the liver se- 
cretes bile. Hippocrates writes that: *' The 
brain resembles a gland, being white and soft 
like glands. It discharges the same glandu- 
lar offices as regards the head. It rids the 
head of its humidity, and returns to the ex- 
tremities the surplus of its flux." With this 
postulate, that it is a gland, one authority 
after another attempted to represent the 
brain's secretion as a kind of subtle fluid 
termed "animal spirits," which permeated 
the body through the blood. Thus Descartes 
taught that the left ventricle of the heart sep- 
arated these animal spirits, which had been 
generated in the brain, and distilled them out 
14 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

of the blood into a " very living and very 
pure flame," and then distributed them 
through the arteries. These animal spirits, 
therefore, were readily made to account for 
everything, normal and abnormal. Hence, it 
was due to noxious vapors and humors that 
every variety of bodily disorder took its rise. 

To illustrate how etfectually such concep- 
tions served to block all progress in the 
science of life we may quote one instance 
from a ponderous volume in my library with 
the date 1618, on "Physiology and Anat- 
omy," by Hilkiah Crooke, Physician and 
Professor on Anatomy and Chirurgery to 
His Majesty, James I. 

Speaking of the origin and growth of hair, 
he says: '' The immediate matter of the 
haires is a sooty, thicke, and earthy vapour, 
which in the time of the third concoction [dis- 
tillation] is elevated by the strength of the 
action of naturall heate, and passeth through 
the pores of the skin, which heate exiceateth 
or drieth this moysture of these sootie and 
15 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tliicke vapours, for the vapour being thicke, 
in his passage leaveth some part if it selfe, 
to wit, the grossest, in the very outlet, where 
it is impacted by a succeeding vapour arising 
where the former did, is protruded and 
thrust forward, so that they are wrought to- 
gether in one body. The straightness of the 
passages of the skin where through the mat- 
ter of the haires is auoyded, formeth them 
into a small roundness, even as a wyre re- 
ceyeth that j)roportion whereof the whole is, 
where through it is drawne." 

One great office of the hairs of the head, 
therefore, Crooke perceived to be to lead off 
" the vapours which otherwise would choke 
and make smoaky the braine," though how 
hopelessly choked the brains of all bald 
heads hence would be he does not mention. 
Crooke 's illustrious contemporary. Lord Ba- 
con, held that the blood did not distend the 
heart, nor cause it to beat, but that was done 
by its contained spirits. Even Harvey's dis- 
covery of the circulation of the blood did not 
16 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

dislodge these pure nonentities from the 
brain, for we find as late as 1824, Dr. J. Ma- 
son Good, in his ' ' Study of Medicine, ' ' men- 
tioning the fact that the brain being a gland, 
the nervous power or energy issues from it 
as a fluid of a peculiar kind, and is so distrib- 
uted by its nerves. 

It was the introduction of the microscope 
into the investigation of nervous tissues 
which first really exorcised the '' animal 
spirits " from the medical world. Their ob- 
jective existence in fact had often been called 
in question before, but it was difficult to ban- 
ish these airy creations altogether until some 
solid physical facts could be found which 
would dispose of them. 

Without the microscope we could never 
have known what every living texture really 
is, nor after what fashion it is constructed. 
With the microscope Ehrenberg made in 1833 
the first discovery of a nerve cell in a spinal 
ganglion, and four years later Purkinje dem- 
onstrated that the gray matter of the cere- 
17 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

brum and of the cerebellum is made up 
of nervous cells and their fibers. This 
was followed in the next year by the pub- 
lication of the great work of Schleiden 
and Schwann, in which they proved that 
all vegetable and animal tissues are made 
up of cells and the products of cells. The 
intimate structure of all tissues and or- 
gans was thus revealed, and each was found 
to be perfectly characteristic of its kind, 
whether bony, tendinous, glandular, muscu- 
lar, nervous, etc. Nervous tissue especially is 
very peculiar and unlike anything else in the 
body, and least of all like glandular tissue. 
The brain, therefore, was thus shown to be 
no^ more a gland than a hand or foot is, and 
that it never secretes anything. The brain 
instead is a special and distinct organ, con- 
necting with nothing but nerves, acting and 
acted upon only through nerves or nervous 
masses, called ganglia, which are distributed 
through the body. 

It was not long before this conception of 
18 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

the brain as a separate mechanism in us, con- 
structed after its own pattern, began to give 
rise to a new batch of theories. Gall — to 
whom brain anatomy owes a good deal, par- 
ticularly in the tracing of the course of the 
brain fibers down through the medulla ob- 
longata — regarding the brain as one organ, 
conceived that its convolutions served to 
mark it off into so many compartments, each 
with its distinctive mental functions which 
he proceeded to identify. He thus made out 
a list of twenty-four brain localities pos- 
sessed with special intellectual or moral 
attributes, and which his pupil Spurzheim 
increased to thirty-eight. Now as all individ- 
uals have their personal peculiarities of mind 
and of disposition, these, in turn, could be 
explained by the development of their cor- 
responding convolutions. Thus, a mathema- 
tician would have a highly developed mathe- 
matical convolution, and a combative man 
would possess his brain seat of combative- 
ness, etc. This so-called science of phren- 
19 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

ology had great vogue for a time, owing to its 
further assumption that the outer contour of 
the head corresponded to the arrangements 
of the convolutions within, and thus afforded 
a ready physical basis for estimating what 
manner of man or woman each person was. 
So popular became this supposed scientific 
standard of individuality, that I once heard 
a prominent clergyman remark that before 
he addressed a young man about his soul he 
wished he could be allowed to feel his 
'' bumps." 

But as in the case of animal spirits, so 
phrenology had to disappear before facts. It 
was shown that Gall and his followers did not 
study a sufficient number of brains, because, 
on the one hand, their mathematical convo- 
lutions were found as largely developed in 
the brains of paupers, dying in hospitals, as 
in the few mathematicians whose brains Gall 
had investigated; while the brains of some 
eminent men had no specially developed con- 
volutions where they ought to have had them. 
20 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

On the other hand, while the inner table of 
the skull corresponds in a general way with 
the subjacent convolutions, it does not keep 
shape with any special convolution whatever ; 
while as respects the outer table of the skull 
there may be no correspondence at all. 
Phrenology, therefore, gradually became the 
exclusive property of popular lecturers, who 
illustrated its doctrines with plates of vari- 
ously labeled heads. 

The period between 1845 and 1860 was 
marked by notable advances, not only in gen- 
eral physiology, but also in the physiology of 
the brain and of the nervous system. The 
great principle of reflex action, that is, of the 
afferent and efferent elements in all nervous 
processes, was established, and many of the 
amazingly intricate paths of nerve fibers in 
the spinal cord and in the brain were traced 
out. France at that time took the lead in all 
branches of medical science, and the names of 
Majendie, Longet, Flourens, Gratiolet, and 
others like them will always rank high in the 
21 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

annals of neurology. It is not easy at this 
day to appreciate what a paramount influence 
was exerted in the medical world by this 
school of Paris, whose lecture rooms were 
crowded by students from all countries. 

But, partly as a reaction from the doc- 
trines of phrenology, all separate localiza- 
tion of functions in the brain was strongly 
denied, while the opposite and no less erro- 
neous teaching was promulgated, that the 
brain always acts as a whole. The cerebral 
convolutions were regarded as the " senso- 
rium commune," and, as one of them ex- 
pressed it, " any specific vibration initiated 
in each kind of sensory nerve thrills through- 
out the whole or greater part of the mass of 
the brain. ' ' Thus medical opinion seemed to 
settle down to the conclusion that our two 
brain hemispheres corresponded to our two 
lungs, in the respect that every part dis- 
charges the same functions with the rest. 

But a great change was impending. On 
April 14, 1861, an eminent French hospital 
22 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

surgeon, Paul Broca, read a paper before the 
Societe d'Anthropologie of Paris, in which 
he adduced evidences to prove: 

That there is a definite locality in the 
brain which is the sole seat of articulate 
speech, found in a limited area in the lower 
and posterior part of the convolution called 
the third frontal and which is now named 
'* Broca 's convolution." This fact, of 
course, could only be demonstrated by inju- 
ries to that part in the human subject, and 
Broca showed, by citing a number of post- 
mortem examinations of persons dying after 
paralysis of the right side of the body, usually 
due to apoplexy and who with the onset of the 
paralysis lost the power of utterance — that 
in all such cases damage to that locality was 
demonstrable. As this statement seemed at 
first to be a reversion to the tenets of phren- 
ology, it gave rise to so much heated discus- 
sion and denial, that it was not until about 
1865 that it began to be generally admitted. 

What chiefly led to its final acceptance was 
23 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the further discovery that the two other ele- 
ments of human speech besides articulate 
utterance also have each their distinct and 
separate brain localities; one place being 
found for the words we receive through the 
ear, damage to which place causes word-deeif- 
ness, even though there be no deafness to 
other sounds than words; and, secondly, one 
place for words received through the eye in 
reading, damage to which causes the subject 
at once to become wholly illiterate, though he 
may see and recognize all other objects of 
sight, except words, as well as ever. 

The demonstration of these anatomical 
bases of the faculty of speech soon led to care- 
ful experimental investigation of the brain in 
animals for other seats of distinct functions, 
constituting what is now termed cerebral lo- 
calization, and to a comparison of the results 
achieved with the effects of injury or of dis- 
ease in the brain of man. By 1870, through 
the labors of both experimental physiologists 
and practicing physicians, such as Hitzig, 
24 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

Ferrier, Munk, Luciani, Charcot and others, 
it was shown that each of the special senses 
has its anatomical seat in the brain; and, in 
addition to that, in a centrally placed zone 
are to be fonnd the seats governing the vol- 
untary movements of the muscles of the body, 
so that each muscle, or group of muscles, can 
be made to contract by excitation of the cor- 
responding locality in the cortex or surface of 
the brain. 

These discoveries were great enough of 
themselves, but they are relatively of sec- 
ondary importance compared with those 
which followed and which will cause the name 
of Broca, as yet scarcely known by the gen- 
eral public, to rank in the history of science 
along with the names of Copernicus and of 
Isaac Newton. The anatomical seats of the 
senses, and those of muscular movements, are 
found equally in both hemispheres of the 
brain, and their functions, as such, are doubt- 
less congenital. It was thus natural to in- 
fer, as the brain is a double organ, like our 
25 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

two eyes and our two ears, each hemisphere 
being the duphcate of the other, that both 
brains would equally participate in all brain 
work. 

But a most unexpected fact, and one of far- 
reaching significance, was soon demonstrat- 
ed, namely, that the anatomical seats of the 
faculty of speech are found only in one of the 
two hemispheres. Thus, if the Broca convo- 
lution, which is the seat of articulate speech, 
be damaged in a person after middle life, the 
loss is usually irremediable, so that he can 
speak no longer though the same convolution 
in the other hemisphere be wholly intact. The 
same is true as regards word-deafness or 
word-blindness from injury of their respect- 
ive places, for the corresponding localities in 
the other hemisphere, though not hurt at all, 
nevertheless are entirely word-deaf and 
word-blind, simply because they never had 
anything to do with speech. 

But here again another new element in the 
problem presented itself, which proved that 
26 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

the endowment of one hemisphere with the 
great gift of speech was not owing to any 
original or special fitness of that hemisphere 
for such a function, but solely because it 
was the hemisphere related to the most used 
hand in childhood. In all right-handed per- 
sons, it is in the left brain that the speech 
centers are located ; while in left-handed per- 
sons, they are found exclusively in the right 
brain. 

Two conclusions inevitably follow upon 
these facts, first, that brain matter, as such, 
does not originate speech, for then both hemi- 
spheres would have their speech centers ; and 
second, that either of the hemispheres is 
equally good for speech, if something begins 
early enough in life to use it for that purpose. 
That something is the most commonly used 
hand by the human child at the time when it 
is learning everything, for self -education al- 
ways begins in our race with the stretching 
forth of the hand, as any one may note in the 
first purposive actions of an infant. The 
27 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

hand which it then most used to learn by de- 
termined which of its two brain hemispheres 
sliould know speech, and which hemisphere 
should remain wordless, and therefore 
thoughtless, for life. 

This latter statement, that thought, as 
such, is a function only of the hemisphere con- 
nected with the faculty of speech, was deci- 
sively demonstrated by the next revelation 
which followed upon Broca's fruitful discov- 
ery. Without any help from metaphysics, 
and upon a much surer basis than any meta- 
physical theories, it was simply found as a 
physical fact that our mental faculties, as 
such, are quite distinct from the elementary 
functions of sensation and of motion. These 
latter are congenital, but our ability to recog- 
nize and, therefore, to know what the particu- 
lar objects or meanings be of what our senses 
report, is not congenital, but as much ac- 
quired by us as our speech is acquired 
and not congenital. Because, connected with 
the original anatomical seats of sight and of 
28 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

hearing were found certain physical, anatom- 
ical areas of brain matter, injury of which 
abolished all power to recognize what the eye 
sees or the ear hears. In the visual area is 
a place which, if damaged, renders the per- 
son unable to recognize members of his own 
family, though he see them; and in the audi- 
tory area are places, one of which, if hurt, 
causes the person to be no longer able to 
know his most familiar tunes when he hears 
them; while, by injury in another spot, he 
loses all power of distinguishing sounds in 
general, so that he cannot tell the bark of a 
dog from the song of a bird, because they are 
alike only noises to him. And here again, 
these important brain areas in us, interpret- 
ing what sights or sounds mean, are found 
only in the left hemisphere of the right- 
handed, and in the right hemisphere of the 
left-handed; in other words, in the hemi- 
sphere in which the seats of the faculty of 
speech are located. 

The decisive bearing of these pure mat- 
29 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

ters of fact upon our whole discussion of the 
Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind 
and to the Personality is plain enough. As 
none of these wonderful mental faculties, in- 
cluding that of speech, were connected with 
brain matter at birth, but were created after- 
wards, it follows that they were created by 
the individual himself anatomically modify- 
ing his own brain. That brain matter did not 
itself organize these physical areas of mental 
function is shown by their entire absence 
from the convolutions of the wordless hemi- 
sphere. 

As these physical relations of the brain to 
the mind are to be fully discussed in our suc- 
ceeding chapters, we would have preferred 
not to have alluded to them so far in advance, 
and we have done so now only for this reason. 
Many persons may imagine that such a 
theme must involve a discussion of what the 
mind is, and, therefore, enter upon the wide 
domain of metaphysics. We propose to avoid 
anything of the kind, as our subject deals pri- 
30 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

marily with a thing of physics, namely, the 
brain. But the main facts about the structure 
and working of the brain are of such recent 
discovery that they scarcely yet have become 
generally known, at least in comparison with 
the latest discoveries in the physical sciences. 
Regarded, however, simply as matters of 
knowledge, these new additions to our infor- 
mation about the one organ in us which is re- 
lated to thought can be second to none in in- 
terest and importance. 



31 



CHAPTER II 

ACCOUNT OF THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF THE MIND 

Two fundamentally opposed conceptions 
have existed about the relations of the Brain 
to the Mind, which may be illustrated by com- 
paring the brain to either one of two differ- 
ent instruments or mechanisms for producing 
music, an ^olian harp or a violin. Thus, 
if the brain may be regarded as an organ 
from which thoughts proceed, the question 
then becomes. Do thoughts arise in it as 
musical sounds flow from an ^olian harp or 
as they come from a violin I 

Both the ^olian harp and the violin are 
constructed by threads of catgut stretched 
over apertures in a wooden box. The music 
of the ^olian harp comes from it when it is 
placed where currents of air can flow through 
its threads, and its notes will then vary ac- 
32 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

cording to the direction, the strength and the 
velocity of the currents. The air which gen- 
erates the music is a part of the whole out- 
side atmosphere, and while each harp has its 
own peculiarities of size, number of threads, 
position, etc., its function source has no pe- 
culiarity, but is one and the same in all. In 
like manner, some hold, currents of thought 
are excited in the brain by the incoming- 
sensations transmitted from without by the 
vibrations of the various nerve fibers which 
are specially adapted to receive impres- 
sions, and these vibrations in turn awaken 
those responses among the fibers and cells 
of the brain which constitute feelings and 
ideas. 

On this view a man's brain may be regarded 
as a specially constructed mechanism whose 
individual peculiarities in its working, as 
shown in his daily life, are all due to the 
arrangement of its material component parts. 
Some lives give forth long, rich, harmonious 
notes throughout ; others, from unhappy dis- 
33 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

position of their fibers, give forth little else 
than prolonged discords; and others a 
strange mixture of both; but all these indi- 
vidual, or so-called personal characteristics 
are matters of cerebral structure, as this 
is acted upon by the innumerable nerve 
stimuli proceeding from the outer world. 
More or less defined conceptions of this kind 
about the relation of the brain to the mind are 
quite prevalent, particularly among those 
who emphasize the influence of heredity in 
the genesis of individual or moral traits. The 
logical conclusion of this position is, that the 
mind on the last analysis is the product of 
the composition and properties of brain mat- 
ter, and its operations of whatever sort are 
reactions among the brain elements to the 
play of external forces. 

The other and essentially different concep- 
tion is that the brain, if likened to a musical 
instrument, resembles a violin in that, how- 
ever good it be as a musical instrument, and 
however carefully it has to be constructed in 
34 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

all its parts to become such an instrument, 
yet of itself it cannot give forth a musical 
note, much less take part in a complex sym- 
phony, without a musician to use it. There- 
fore, though no musician can give us violin 
music without a violin, so no violin can be 
musical without a musician. It should be 
noted that this theory requires mechanism, 
and the complete integrity of the mechanism, 
quite as much as the other. In fact, the musi- 
cal vibrations within the box depend so much 
for their qualities upon the wood out of 
which the violin is made that extraordinary 
simis have been paid for a Stradivarius on 
that account alone. But though mechanism 
be such an essential element in both, the en- 
trance of a wholly different factor in the case 
of the violin, namely, the musician, makes it 
impossible to harmonize the analogies to 
brain function drawn from these two instru- 
ments. In the one we have only the effects 
of external forces acting upon material 
things; while in the other we likewise have 
35 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

material things, but the effects come from a 
source entirely distinct from and wholly inde- 
pendent of them. We only need now to fol- 
low up each of these views to their inevitable 
conclusions to recognize how far apart they 
are. The one regards the mind as wholly of 
the brain, and hence the mind can have no 
existence apart from the brain. The other 
regards the brain as nothing more than the 
instrument of the mind, and no instrument 
can possibly be identical with the agency 
which uses it. 

As the brain itself gave not the least sign 
of its activities, so much so that, as already 
mentioned, the world for ages did not sus- 
pect that it had any connection with thought 
or feeling, it was natural that the discussion 
should center first about the terms mind and 
body. As regards the mind, the processes 
themselves of thought appeared to offer in 
their genesis and sequence the only elements 
for examination. Metaphysicians, therefore, 
have labored at the problem for centuries, 
36 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

but without coming to any agreement, one 
chief reason for their failure being that in 
their methods of investigation they have had 
to rely upon introspection. But the difficulty 
with introspection is that it is like a man try- 
ing to lift himself by his own boot straps. 
As our mental processes both begin and end 
within ourselves, they offer little which is ob- 
jective for us to go by. We need instead 
some external fulcrum to draw upon for sat- 
isfactory inferences. 

Such a fulcrum seems at last to be prom- 
ised to us by modern discoveries connected 
with the brain itself in its relations as an or- 
ganism to certain definite mental functions. 
This was not possible so long as the brain 
was regarded as a single organ working as 
a unit, with the same relations in all its parts 
to consciousness and thought that the air cells 
wherever located in the lungs bear to res- 
piration. Looked at thus, the physiologist 
with the brain before him was even worse off 
than the metaphysician, for nothing could be 
37 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

more undemonstrative to mere inspection 
than healthy brain matter. Physiologists, 
therefore, were obliged to investigate the 
brain, bit by bit, to find whether some parts 
of it were more connected with certain psy- 
chical functions than others. After the most 
extensive experiments were made on the 
brains of living animals, certain impor- 
tant facts were demonstrated which have 
most direct bearings on the problem. More- 
over, these experimental deductions have 
been further confirmed by observations of the 
effects of local brain damage caused in man 
by injuries or disease. By these means it is 
now proven that the gray matter of the brain 
surface is specially arranged to subserve cer- 
tain specific psychical functions only in cer- 
tain localities in its substance. It is not the 
whole brain which sees or hears, but only par- 
ticular limited areas to which the conscious- 
ness of sight and of hearing respectively are 
confined. Likewise the voluntary movements 
of each group of muscles in the body have 
38 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

been found to proceed from certain well- 
defined starting points on the brain surface, 
and these are so well demonstrated that the 
surgeon often knows, by noting what muscles 
are implicated, just where to open the skull 
with his trephine so as to find the lesion or 
injury in the brain. 

On these grounds the inference seems prob- 
able that every special psychical function is 
subserved by its own special seat in the mate- 
rial organ of the mind. Hence, by these dis- 
coveries we do seem to have come into pos- 
session of really objective facts where before 
everything was subjective; because nothing 
could partake more of the nature of an ob- 
jective fact than the identification of an area 
of brain matter with a given brain function, 
by that function becoming invariably im- 
paired according as its brain place is dam- 
aged. 

We propose, therefore, to discuss in the 
following pages the bearing which these now 
demonstrated relations of brain structure to 
39 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

mental operations have upon the two oppo- 
site views above stated of the relations of the 
brain to the mind. 

Fortunately for the general reader, the es- 
sential facts bearing upon our present dis- 
cussion can be readily demonstrated and 
easily understood. All are agreed that as far 
as the brain is concerned, the gray matter of 
the brain surface, technically called the cor- 
tex, is the ultimate seat of all processes con- 
nected with sensation and thought. This 
gray matter consists of a continuous layer, 
whose average thickness is from one-twelfth 
to one-eighth of an inch, of a soft material of 
a very complex structure, in which are im- 
bedded immense numbers of little bodies, 
of various shapes and sizes, unfortunately 
called '^ cells," for they are not hollow. Be- 
tween these cells ramifies a network of in- 
numerable fine gray fibers. To save space 
this layer of gray matter is everywhere 
folded upon itself, as one would crumple up 
a handkerchief in his hand, so that the sur- 
40 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

face of the brain presents a number of fur- 
rows or creases between the folds. The chief 
furrows, however, are quite definite in their 
location, so that the main folds are called 
lobes, and the smaller ones convolutions, and 
these in turn serve to map out the different 
regions of the brain surface which are then 
named accordingly. 

Underneath and within the gray layer, and 
constituting the greater part of the brain 
mass, is the white matter, which consists of 
bundles of gray fibers contained within 
sheaths of apparently an insulating material 
and white in color. Some gray fibers, how- 
ever, have no coating. The function of a 
nerve fiber is wholly that of a conductor to 
and from the gray matter. On that account 
the white matter is not, like the gray matter 
of the surface, the primary seat of any men- 
tal power, though in many instances these 
fibers form important links between the vari- 
ous cortical areas which seem to promote 
associated actions between them. 
41 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

Here, therefore, in the gray matter of the 
surface of the brain we have a material sub- 
stance which is the definite seat of the con- 
scious mind. For, as just stated, if one par- 
ticular area of this gray layer be destroyed, 
sight is totally lost, though the eye itself in 
all its parts, with the nervous tract leading 
therefrom to the brain, be wholly intact. If 
another particular cortical area is similarly 
injured, hearing is abolished, though the ear 
with all its apparatus be uninjured. The con- 
sciousness of sight or of hearing, therefore, 
is neither in the eye nor ear respectively, but 
in these special localities on the brain sur- 
face. To use the phrase of an old anatomist, 
the gray matter is the animal. Kegarded 
thus, this form of matter is the most interest- 
ing and important substance in the world, for 
it is the only matter which we know of that 
is directly associated with mind. 

There can be no question also that upon 
the integrity of this gray matter depends 
the integrity of all mental processes, for 
43 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

these can be proportionately perverted by 
anything which interferes with the physical 
conditions of the gray tissue, or by agents 
which derange its working. Thus mechani- 
cal injuries of the brain in man often have 
been followed by peculiar mental disorders, 
sometimes including change in disposition 
or in moral character. 

The most striking illustrations of this kind, 
however, and which can be produced at will, 
are furnished by the action of brain poisons. 
In fact a curiously interesting treatise might 
be written with the title of the ' ' Metaphysics 
of a Drug Store." Thus, opium powerfully 
stimulates those mental processes which are 
related to the imagination, so that the opium 
taker becomes intensely interested in his own 
trains of suggested ideas. He is there- 
fore silent and solitary, and thus contrasts 
with the alcohol taker, who has his feel- 
ings and emotions so stimulated by that 
poison that he would fain share them with 
other persons, and becomes both familiar 
43 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

and talkative. One of the most singular 
in its effects on the mind is haschish or In- 
dian hemp. When fully under its influence, 
the haschish smoker can be made to entertain 
a most vivid sense of the objective reality of 
any suggestion which is made to his fancy. 
I once knew a party of Arabs who, while all 
drunk together with this drug, came to an 
opening in an over-arched street in an Ori- 
ental town through which the moonlight 
streamed upon the pavement. The leader of 
the party took the moonlight for a pool of 
water and forthwith drew up his trousers to 
wade carefully through it, and was followed 
by all the rest of them doing the same thing. 
Hence, by merely introducing certain defi- 
nite substances into the blood stream, as it 
rapidly courses through the brain from its 
four great arteries, we can produce well-de- 
fined mental processes characteristic of the 
operations of these agents; or, in other 
words, sensations, feelings and ideas specifi- 
cally generated by these wholly material 
44 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

things. In time also the persistent use of 
these agents seems to alter the personality 
itself. Thus, a confirmed drunkard finally 
becomes more unlike his former self than an 
average European differs from an average 
Asiatic. 

At first sight such facts as these seem to 
indicate that the brain and mind are one. 
Change the state of the brain, and the thinker 
is changed accordingly. It is not surprising, 
therefore, that previous to the progress of 
discovery within the last twenty-five years, it 
appeared as if nothing could be postulated 
about mental phenomena apart from the ma- 
terial condition of the mind's organ. The 
^olian harp theory that sensation and 
thought are the products of vibrations 
through a specially arranged mechanism, 
seemed to correspond most naturally with 
the facts. 

But unfortunately for this conclusion, all 
the facts adduced in its support can be ad- 
duced just as conclusively in support of the 
45 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

opposite theory of the brain being but the in- 
strument of the thinker, as the violin is the 
instrument of the musician who plays upon 
it. The most skillful violinist would draw 
forth nothing but crazy sounds from his in- 
strument if its cords were smeared with 
grease instead of with rosin, and every men- 
tal disorder from delirium to coma can be 
paralleled by corresponding musical de- 
rangements due to purely structural condi- 
tions in the violin itself, and not at all in the 
performer. It then would be from no fault 
of his, but solely from conditions in his in- 
strument that every sound which he can get 
out of it is faulty. Indeed, the rightful direc- 
tor of thought may often appear to be striv- 
ing to regulate the brain of a drunkard, just 
as a musician would deal with a disordered 
instrument; and still more strikingly do we 
see something akin to this in certain states 
of insanity. 

We are thus left by these considerations 
just where we were before; and hence we 
46 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND 

must go further and deeper than physical 
changes in brain matter can take us to arrive 
at satisfactory conceptions of the true rela- 
tions of the brain to the mind. 



47 



CHAPTER III 

BRAIN WEIGHT AND MENTAL FACULTY 

What we have arrived at so far is that the 
gray matter is the physical basis of the mind. 
No one now disputes this. The eye does not 
see any more than an opera glass sees. It 
is one place only in the gray cortex which 
actually sees. And as with the consciousness 
of sight, so doubtless the seat of every other 
special form of mind consciousness is some- 
where in this mysterious layer. But how far 
does this take us? 

Not very far, because if we hence should 
infer that consciousness in all its forms of 
sensation, feeling, perception, thought, etc., 
depended wholly on the existence of so much 
gray matter, we should soon encounter a 
series of material, i. e., physical, facts and 
conditions which, if they did not actually con- 
iS 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

tradict such inferences, would at least seri- 
ously modify them. 

To begin with the simplest as well as the 
most physical facts. In all animals there is 
a close correspondence between the degree of 
development of any organ and its functional 
power or activity. A powerful arm implies 
a big arm, or at least not an undersized one. 
Is a powerful brain likewise a big brain, or 
at least not an undersized brain? In other 
words, does the actual size of brain in man 
bear any direct relation to mental capacity? 
This question may be answered in the affirm- 
ative, only, however, with so many qualifica- 
tions that it then becomes by itself of little 
account in our discussion. Thus the brains 
of most idiots and of half-witted persons are 
usually smaller and weigh less than the aver- 
age of normal brains, while many men dis- 
tinguished for their mental powers have had 
large and heavy brains. But the exceptions 
are very numerous both ways. Thus, assum- 
ing the average weight of normal European 
49 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

brains among men to be 49,5 omices, we have 
the following list of the brain weights of dis- 
tinguished men given by Prof. John Mar, 
shall:! 

Abercrombie 64.7 

Lord Campbell 56.7 

Webster 55.5 

Chalmers 54.8 

De Morny 54 

Whewell 51.2 

Grote 52 

Tiedmann 47.4 

Hansemann 45.4 

The last two, a distinguished physiologist 
and a mineralogist, were below the normal. 
But just such variations are found among 
people in general not at all distinguished. 
Even among paupers, in a large series of 
observations cited by Professor Marshall, 
thirteen brains among nine hundred were 
found to weigh above sixty ounces. The 

^ Jour. Anatomy and Physiology, 1892-1893, vol. xxvii., 
pp. 21-65. 

50 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

heaviest, perfectly healthy brain was that of 
a mechanic, which weighed just above 
seventy ounces. 

In the Journal of the Biometrical Society, 
June, 1905,1 p^of. Karl Pearson, F.E.S., and 
Dr. Eaymond Pearl give the results of an 
analysis of 2,100 adult male and 1,034 adult 
female brain weights, belonging to five 
races — Swedish, Bavarian, Hessian, Bohem- 
ian and English — with the conclusion that 
'' There is no evidence that brain weight is 
sensibly correlated with intellectual ability. 
Of the five races investigated by the bio- 
metricians, the English have the smallest 
mean brain weight. The mean of the adult 
Englishman is 27 grams less than the Bavar- 
ian mean, 57 grams less than the Hessian 
mean, 65 grams less than the Swedish mean, 
and 120 grams less than the Bohemian 
mean." 

On the other hand, brain bulk as such 
varies according to racial peculiarities, with 

1 Nature, Dec. 28, 1905, p. 200. 

51 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

little or no reference to mental faculty. Thus 
the ancient Peruvians, who founded the em- 
pire of the Incas, must be regarded as an in- 
tellectual people, but they were remarkable 
both for the small size of their skulls and for 
brains which were on an average no larger 
than those of many idiots. 

One of the latest discussions on this sub- 
ject is by Prof. David Hansemann,^ who made 
a most careful examination of the brain of 
the most remarkable man in modern times 
for pure intellectual powers, Hermann von 
Helmholtz. Prof. Hansemann was much dis- 
appointed to find that Helmholtz 's brain 
weighed barely 45 ounces. But the brain of 
Dr. DoUinger, the eminent historian, weighed 
only 37.7 ounces. He concludes his elaborate 
paper on this subject with the remark, that 
all investigators agree that the weight of 
the brain bears no relation to the mental 
capacity of man. Likewise the external 

^ Ueber das Gehirn von Hermann von Helmholtz von Pro- 
fessor David Hansemann. Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie und 
Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 20. Band. Leipzig, 1899 

52 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

measure of the head is of no account what- 
ever. No man's intellect can be judged by 
the size of his hat. Johannes Muller's had 
the large circumference of 614 millimetres, 
Eichard Wagner 's 600 millimetres, but Napo- 
leon 's was only 564 and Darwin's 563 milli- 
metres. 

Therefore if any conclusions can be drawn 
from these considerations it would seem as 
if brain organization was more important 
than mere size. Hence it follows that neither 
of our two opposing theories is helped by 
these anatomical facts. A gifted violinist 
would greatly prefer to play upon a violin 
of standard make, however expensive it was, 
than appear before a critical audience with 
the cheap product of a village artificer. No 
one can doubt that an originally well-organ- 
ized brain is a good thing to have, but that 
does not affect the real point at issue, which 
is, whether the best-organized brain, or for 
that matter any other brain, can be made to 
think without a thinker. 
53 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

We have, therefore, again to go further 
into the subject than the mere size of the 
brain in man will carry us. But our very 
next step brings us to an anatomical fact of 
primary importance, which seems to make 
our previous discussion about the bulk of 
brain matter quite superfluous. To some, 
indeed, this anatomical fact appears to dis- 
pose of the ^olian harp theory altogether, 
as far as a physical basis for it is concerned. 
So sweeping in reality are the conclusions 
which follow upon this single material fac- 
tor in the problem that it is well to pause and 
take our bearings on all sides to be sure of 
the full import of its significance. 

The question all along has been this. As 
all are agreed that the gray matter is the 
material seat of thought, etc., is it also the 
source of thought? The dictum of Bory St. 
Vincent, Cabanis, Karl Vogt and others, was 
that the brain secretes thought just as the 
liver secretes bile. As a statement this is 
intelligible enough, and all writers who ad- 
54 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

vocate what we have represented as the 
^olian harp theory of the relation of the 
brain to the mind will be found on examina- 
tion to hold essentially the same opinion, 
however they may differ in their statement 
of details. Thought, feeling, volition, etc., 
are, on the last analysis, according to any 
such view, the products of the material or- 
ganization of the gray matter as it responds 
to its appropriate specific stimuli. 

Now it is evident that such a premise in- 
volves one inevitable conclusion, namely, that 
the more gray matter you have the more 
thought, etc., you will have. If this be 
granted it becomes then a question of quanti- 
tative gray matter, and if, in accordance with 
modern conceptions, thought be conceived 
of as a form of energy stored up by the gray 
matter, then the amount of this energy liber- 
ated will be proportionate to the quantity of 
the specific substance which stores it up. But 
even on this hypothesis, mere quantity of the 
mind -generating material is not enough. An- 
55 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

other factor has to be taken fully into ac- 
count, namely, how it is organized, because 
it is only by its special organization that one 
portion of this gray matter is endowed with 
the faculty of sight, and another in a differ- 
ent place does not see but hear, and so on for 
each special sense. But for the present we 
may let this inconvenient factor pass, and re- 
vert to the original proposition, that how- 
ever complex the organizing be, it is the gray 
matter which is organized, and hence the 
more there be of this cerebral stuff, the more, 
correspondingly, will its various mental 
products be. 

But the anatomical fact which wholly dis- 
poses of this theory is that we, like most 
people, and particularly these reasoners, are 
quite inaccurate when we use the word 
*' brain." There is no such thing as a brain 
in a human being. He always has two brains, 
and never one brain, just as he has two eyes 
and two ears. And these two brains are just 
as perfectly matched and duplicates of each 
56 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

other in all their parts as his two eyes and 
his two ears are. 

Therefore if the quantity of gray matter 
is the fact for us to found our superstructure 
upon, one-half of this matter being in the 
right brain and the other half in the left 
brain, it follows that if one of the two brains 
be rendered useless by any chance, either 
half the mind, or half of the mental capacity 
will be gone. Is that sol 

Instead of being so, it has been abundantly 
demonstrated that one of the two brains can 
do all the thinking necessary for the pur- 
poses of life. No addition of mental power, 
nor of mental endowment is secured by our 
having two brains, any more than the faculty 
of sight is increased in us by our having two 
eyes. This, however, is only in accordance, 
as we shall see, with the general law of all 
pair organs in the body, whose existence in 
pairs is for quite other reasons than for in- 
crease in function. It is difficult, therefore, 
to see why our paired brains should consti- 
57 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tute an exception to this law; and that they 
do not do so in fact we shall show by ana- 
tomical evidence of the most convincing kind. 
We may observe here in passing that this 
pairing of the mind's organ is a very per- 
plexing problem to some reasoners. As one 
authority^ remarks, '' We are completely 
in the dark as to the reason why we 
possess two hemispheres," This difficulty 
arises mainly from certain assumptions 
about the relations of thought to matter, 
while the constant use of the term brain un- 
consciously leads to the conception of a 
single organ as the source of thought, just 
as the liver is the only source of bile. It is, 
in fact, an illustration of the dominance of 
this conception that this identical compari- 
son of the brain to the liver occurs so often 
among writers of this school. But though we 
may correctly speak of the eye and of the 
ear in the singular, as long as we are talking 
of the function itself — of sight or of hearing, 

» Sir Michael Foster, Physiology, p. 872, 5th Edition. 

58 



WEIGHT OF BRAIN 

such language is no longer correct when we 
speak of them in the plural, for we then are 
only referring to them as the instruments of 
sight or of hearing. For instruments, and 
nothing but instruments, these pair organs 
certainly are. Though without the eye there 
would be no sight, and without the ear no 
hearing, yet the eye is no more the seat or 
source of sight than is a telescope or a micro- 
scope. Whether, therefore, our two per- 
fectly symmetrical brains are likewise not 
the sources, but rather the instruments, of 
thought, we will now proceed to examine. 



59 



CHAPTER IV 

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BEAIN BEING A DOUBLE OR 
PAIR ORGAN 

Our brains consist of two perfectly matched 
organs technically called the right and left 
hemispheres. As regards their gray matter, 
they correspond furrow for furrow, lobe for 
lobe, and convolution for convolution. Now 
with the partial exception of the hands and 
feet, the salient fact about other pair organs 
in the body is this: That either one of the 
pair can do the whole business of both if 
necessary. It is not one of the two eyes 
which sees red while the other sees green; 
nor, if a man knows the two languages, does 
one ear hear only English and the other only 
German. What one eye sees, the other sees, 
so that if a man should lose one eye, with the 

m 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

remaining eye he might become either an 
astronomer or a microscopist. Some per- 
sons have been known to live for many years 
with only one lung to breathe with. I once 
was called in consultation to see a strong 
workingman who had lived for thirteen years 
wholly unaware that he had only one kidney, 
the other having been destroyed by a stone 
becoming impacted in the tube leading from 
it, when he had an attack of kidney colic. It 
was a similar mishap in the tube of the re- 
maining kidney which first showed what his 
defect was. It is evident, therefore, that the 
chief reasons why we have pair organs is, 
first, for convenience, due to the body itself 
being generally two-sided, right and left; 
and, secondly, to insure against emergencies, 
just as a man will provide himself with two 
keys for the same lock, lest he lose one. 

As regards our brains, however, there is 
one exception to this rule about pair organs, 
in a division of labor between the two hemi- 
spheres, in respect of the control of those 
61 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

muscular movements which are of a voluntary 
character, the centers of those governing the 
right half of the body occupying a tract in the 
gray cortex of the left brain, while those of 
the left half of the body are correspondingly 
located in the right hemisphere. The most 
probable explanation of this arrangement is 
that it insures a more perfect balance be- 
tween the two sides of the body in its muscu- 
lar movements. Thus the two eyes need to 
move in most perfect harmony, and on that 
account there is a special crossing of nerve 
fibers from side to side to secure this unity 
of action. But with respect to thought itself 
the above mentioned law about pair organs 
holds perfectly. 

It has been repeatedly shown by post-mor- 
tem examinations that persons have lived for 
years with only one hemisphere in working 
order, the other having been virtually de- 
stroyed by disease ; but with the exception of 
parts in one-half of their bodies being para- 
lyzed for voluntary movements, such as those 
^2 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

of the arms and legs, they have thought and 
acted and transacted business as well with 
one-half of the gray matter with which they 
started in life, i. e., with only one hemisphere, 
as others are able to use one eye for all pur- 
poses after losing its mate. 

Of many such instances we need cite only 
that of a man who for several years was 
under the observation of an expert neurolo- 
gist, who published a history of his case with 
a full description of the conditions found in 
his brain after death.^ 

The patient had always been strong 
and well, and was forty-seven years of age, 
when he awoke one morning with his whole 
left side numb and paralyzed. He remained 
thus paralyzed for ten years till he died, but 
meantime his speech was perfectly normal, 
his reading good and his memory unaffected. 
He gave no sign of mental weakness, but was 
always intelligent, patient, cheerful and par- 
ticularly good in attention. He read the 
* Dr. Pearce Bailey, Am, Jour. Med. Sciences, March, 1889 

63 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

papers constantly, and liked to talk politics. 
He bore his disability bravely, and was 
neither depressed, emotional, irritable nor 
apathetic. At the autopsy a large cyst, full 
of fluid, occupied the anterior part of the 
right hemisphere, with the whole tissue dis- 
organized and without any remains of gray 
matter, while the posterior half of the hemi- 
sphere was everywhere atrophied. Micro- 
scopical examination of the tissues showed 
the same destruction of the nerve elements. 
Dr. Bailey concludes with saying: " Put- 
ting all together the man (during life) mani- 
fested nothing to indicate that the power of 
operations of his mind had been affected, and 
yet after death the whole of one hemisphere 
was found to be greatly lessened in size, and 
impoverished in cellular constituents, and the 
frontal lobes which some regard as the seat 
of the highest cerebral functions were almost 
totally annihilated on one side." 

On the other hand, there is one anatomical 
fact which might give color to the supposi- 
64 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

tion that our two brains are constructed to 
operate virtually as one organ. At the bot- 
tom of the cleft separating the two hemi- 
spheres there is a large bridge named the 
corpus callosum, four inches in length, and 
which is made up of bundles of white fibers 
which pass from one brain to the other. It 
has been supposed that the function of this 
commissure, as it is called, is to make the 
various brain centers in the two hemispheres 
work together, as some of its fibers have been 
traced from certain areas of the cortex down 
to this bridge and across it to corresponding 
areas in the opposite brain. This surmise 
was apparently strengthened by the frequent 
absence, or only partial development, of this 
commissure in the brains of idiots or of feeble 
minded subjects. But the progress of re- 
search has not confirmed the theory that the 
two hemispheres are functionally imited by 
this connecting bridge. For in cases of men- 
tally defective subjects, where the corpus 
callosum was found wanting, other organic 

65 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

abnormalities were also invariably found 
which had to be taken into account as well. 
Meantime numerous reports have been pub- 
lished of post-mortem examinations per- 
formed by distinguished neurologists on per- 
sons who during life showed no signs of men- 
tal defect, and yet in whom there was no 
corpus callosum between the two hemi- 
spheres. In each of these subjects also there 
was no other abnormality present in the 
brain. Most of these cases were only acci- 
dentally discovered in the bodies of persons 
dying from ordinary diseases, because noth- 
ing in their antecedent history suggested the 
existence of their anatomical peculiarity. 
Thus Eichler reports the case of a man forty- 
three years of age, '' a laborer who during 
life had showed no mental peculiarities, but 
was a diligent, capable workman, a good hus- 
band, and in every respect sober, quiet and 
well-behaved, and could read and write, ' ' but 
in whom the corpus callosum was entirely 
absent. The eminent neurologist, Professor 

m 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

Erb, in reporting two similar cases, remarks 
that *' when the brain is otherwise well-de- 
veloped, with absence of the corpus callosum, 
there may be no disturbance of motility, co- 
ordination, general or special sensibility, re- 
flexes, speech or intelligence." Considering 
the rarity of autopsies in which careful ex- 
aminations of the brain are made, such cases 
may be quite common in the general popula- 
tion without anything in life betraying their 
existence. Undoubtedly this connection be- 
tween the two brains may be of use in pro- 
viding against some accidents to either of the 
cerebral pairs, but these instances of its ab- 
sence only serve to prove that for perform- 
ing the ordinary functions of mental life, the 
two hemispheres are wholly independent of 
each other. Indeed, one investigator of this 
subject remarks that the problem of the use 
of the corpus callosum is still unsolved, as its 
absence appears to be so little missed.^ 

• This subject of absence of the corpus callosum is fully 
treated in an article by the well-known brain anatomist, Prof. 
Alex. Bruce, in Brain, 1889, pp. 171-9. 

67 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

The inference from these facts is perfectly 
obvious. If one-half of the total gray matter 
of our brains is distributed in one hemi- 
sphere, and the other half in the second hemi- 
sphere, it is not for the purpose of doubling, 
or even increasing our mental capacity. We 
might lose one-half of our gray matter, pro- 
vided the loss is only on one side and the 
other side remains whole, without losing a 
single idea thereby. In other words, we 
might reason, argue, calculate, love or hate, 
like or dislike, or, in short, be altogether our- 
selves mentally with only one-half of our 
gray matter left to us. We, therefore, as per- 
sons, do not depend for our personality upon 
the number of ounces of gray matter which 
our cranial cavity contains, but rather on the 
fact whether the gray matter of one of our 
hemispheres be in good condition or not. 
If it is, then the gray matter of the other 
hemisphere is not needed by us for the pur- 
pose of thinking. Our gray matter as such 
is halved, but we ourselves are not only not 
68 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

halved into two half selves by this bilateral 
distribution, but we remain the same men- 
tal unit as ever if only we can keep intact 
that one of the two hemispheres which, as we 
will see later, is the sole seat of thought. 

These undoubted facts, therefore, lead to 
just as undoubted a conclusion, namely, that 
everything involved in our conscious person- 
ality, while related to gray matter, is only 
related to, but not originated by, gray mat- 
ter ; for if it were originated by gray matter, 
then both hemispheres would be equally 
necessary to our complete personality. If a 
stream of water comes from two equal 
sources, the drying up of one stream will 
leave only half the quantity of water run- 
ning ; and just so must the stream of thought 
fall off one-half when one hemisphere is in- 
jured, if it originates in the two perfectly 
equal hemispheres. Or, to put it conversely, 
if gray matter originates thought, then both 
our hemispheres must share equally in pro- 
ducing thought, for one has just as much gray 
69 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

matter as the other, and with just the same 
arrangement and organization of it. 

It is these demonstrated truths which, as 
we have remarked before, prove so embar- 
rassing to those who hold the view that the 
brain makes the mind. As one hemisphere 
is quite enough for all mental requirements, 
they cannot but regard on their principles 
the other hemisphere as quite superfluous. 
So it would be if their principles were valid. 
If thought is actually a secretion or product 
of the brain, as bile is a secretion of the liver, 
then the case with the brain is the same as 
if we had two fully developed livers which, 
however, could not be made to produce more 
bile than one alone does. If our brains are 
never anything more than the instruments 
of a thinker, the thinker might very well have 
two such instruments, and use either one as 
he chooses. 

I have been informed by watchmakers that 
they grow so accustomed to use only one of 
their eyes at their work, that in time they be- 
70 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

come unable to use the other eye for it. We 
shall see further on. that the human thinker 
likewise becomes so accustomed to use only 
one of his brain pair for thought that it is 
doubtful if he ever uses its fellow to formu- 
late a single idea. With which one of the pair 
he will choose to do his thinking for life de- 
pends upon a sort of accident, almost of the 
nature of a whim, during the days of child- 
hood. 

So far we have been gradually approach- 
ing the central subject of all our discussion, 
namely, the relation of the brain to thought. 
Heretofore we have referred to certain as- 
certained localizations of brain functions in 
special places in the brain cortex. But none 
of these functions yet mentioned are neces- 
sarily identical with thinking or thought. A 
sensation like that of sight is not thought, 
however much of thought, after its reception, 
it may give rise to. Likewise a muscular 
movement in response to excitation of the 
corresponding area in the cortex is not itself 

n 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

an act of thought, however it may follow 
upon thought. Now what is thinking f We 
are precluded from asking metaphysics to 
answer this question because our subject 
deals only with the relations of a thing of 
physics, i. e., brain substance, to mind. "We 
are called upon instead to answer the ques- 
tion. Are there definite localities in the brain 
substance which have as close relations to 
acts of pure thinking as we have found to be 
the case in connection with acts of seeing or 
of hearing? 

Unlike the metaphysician, who would begin 
with defining what thought and its elements 
are, we can only cite concrete examples of 
thinking done by or through an active human 
brain. A judge when he takes the briefs 
submitted to him, and sits down to write out 
his opinion, is thinking; an orator making 
ready his oration to sway an assembly, is 
thinking; an author at work on a book is 
thinking; a philosopher pondering a subject 
in philosophy is thinking; and so on. Now 
72 



THE BRAIN A PAIR ORGAN 

is this mental faculty of thinking so depend- 
ent upon the material arrangement of brain 
gray matter in special localities thereof that, 
just as physical injury in the cortical sight 
area may cause total blindness, so a similar 
injury in these special areas — all other brain 
areas remaining intact — would make it im- 
possible for the judge to write an opinion, 
the orator to compose his speech, or the 
author to go on with his book? 

It is even so, and the demonstration of how 
and why it is so furnishes more data for the 
correct estimation of the true relation of the 
brain to the mind than any of the facts which 
we have heretofore been considering. It has 
been discovered that certain well-defined 
areas of the brain cortex minister as directly 
to human thinking as others do to special 
sensations or to movements, and when once 
we appreciate their significance, we must 
admit that no greater discoveries than these 
have been achieved in science. We cannot 
ask to be led higher than to the very seats 
73 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

where thought becomes articulate, aud we 
may well pause when we find ourselves un- 
mistakably there, to ask what it all means. 
"We have been seeking for the material 
whereabouts of mind, if such there be, and 
hence the question whether we can come 
into the physical neighborhood of some great 
and purely mental faculty cannot but in- 
volve the solution of our whole problem. It 
was indeed a great step to discover just 
where a sensory stimulus traveling from the 
outside world along a nerve fiber ends, not 
only in a physical stopping place, but in a 
conscious perception. We are, however, far 
more than conscious selves only. We are 
thinking selves, and nothing could be more 
important than to investigate the physical 
bases of the one transcendent human endow- 
ment which is so associated with thought 
itself tliat no true thinking is possible in man 
without its exercise. 



74 



CHAPTER V 

THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

Befoee entering upon the consideration of 
the Faculty of Speech and its bearing upon 
the subject of our discussion it is fitting to 
note the fact that no investigation of the hu- 
man body itself affords the least explanation 
why man is man. There is nothing in his 
physical frame which truly separates him 
from other animals, because every member 
and organ of his body has its counterpart or 
analogue in the bodies of other animals. Man 
shares with other mammalia the same kind 
of lungs to breathe with ; his blood circulates 
through the same kind of heart and arteries 
and veins; he digests and assimilates his 
food by the same kind of apparatus, with all 
its varieties of parts and accessories; his 
secreting glands, his muscles, Ms bones and, 
75 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

in short, every other bodily thing in him is 
like unto theirs. Also not only the anatomy, 
but the physiology, that is, the working of 
every physical element in man, is so strictly 
in keeping with that of other mammals that 
much the greater part of our knowledge of 
human physiology is derived from investiga- 
tions into the physiology of other animals. 
We even deduce from experiments on them 
how either medicines or poisons may affect 
ourselves. 

But there is one organ of his body which 
immediately suggests itself as necessarily a 
great exception to all this. The mind of man ; 
what must its organ be? How could the 
human brain be other than a most excep- 
tional brain in the whole animal series'? 
This inference seemed so certain that the 
most diligent search was long continued for 
the physical counterpart in man's brain to 
his marvelous intellect. Nothing, therefore, 
could have been more disappointing than to 
discover that the brain of the chimpanzee, 
76 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

as far as structure goes, presents us with not 
only every lobe, but with every convolution 
of the human brain. 

The chief facts, indeed, respecting the 
functions of the different areas of our own 
brain cortex, so far determined by physiolo- 
gists, have been deduced from experiments 
on the brains of anthropoid apes. All at- 
tempts to demonstrate a new, or superadded, 
or special collection or arrangement of gray 
matter in man 's brain, which no other animal 
possesses, have failed. Ever since Huxley 
showed, against Owen, that the human brain 
has not even one peculiarity not found in a 
baboon's brain, no one expects that the scal- 
pel will reveal a single physical explanation 
as to why the mind of a baboon and the mind 
of a physiologist who dissects him are so in- 
finitely apart. If the similarity of brain for- 
mation and mechanism, carried out to the 
smallest details, be all that is needed, there 
would be no reason why baboons could not 
become philosophers or mathematicians. 
77 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

Man's body, therefore, including his brain, 
leaves man himself wholly unexplained. 
Professor Huxley puts the subject thus: 
''As to the convolutions, the brains of the 
apes exhibit every stage of progress, from 
the almost smooth brain of the marmoset to 
the orang and chimpanzee, which fall but 
little below man. And it is most remarkable 
that as soon as all the principal sulci [fis- 
sures] appear, the pattern according to 
which they are arranged is identical with 
that of the corresponding sulci of man. . . . 
So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, 
it is clear that man differs less from the 
chimpanzee and orang, than these do even 
from the monkeys, and that the difference 
between the brain of the chimpanzee and of 
man is almost insignificant when compared 
with that between the chimpanzee brain and 
that of a lemur.'* 

But there is one physiological standard by 
which man can be truly measured, which ap- 
plies to him alone, and which rounds his 
.78 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

whole marvelous being — his faculty of 
speech. The immeasurable distance between 
man and every other animal on earth is fully 
accounted for by the existence, the nature 
and the significance of man's words. By the 
sayings of Francis Bacon we find ourselves 
in the presence of an intellect which grasps 
the principles of all knowledge. In the words 
of Shakespeare wellnigh every experience 
of human life is vividly embodied. We are 
awed by the sublimity and the solemnity of 
the thoughts of him who expressed himself 
in the words of the Ninetieth Psalm. So, the 
more we ponder it, the more impassable 
grows the gulf between the minds of those 
who could speak thus and the minds of dumb 
animals. They cannot be the same beings 
in kind, however similar their bodily rela- 
tionships be, because the more we recognize 
what the presence of the Logos in man im- 
plies, the plainer becomes the reason why he 
stands alone in this world. 
Professor Huxley remarks on this sub- 
79 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

jeet:^ "After passion and prejudice have 
died away the same result will attend the 
teachings of the naturalist respecting that 
great Alps and Andes of the living world — 
Man. Our reverence for the nobility of man- 
hood will not be lessened by the knowledge 
that Man is in substance and in structure one 
with the brutes, for he alone possesses the 
marvellous endowment of intelligible and 
rational speech. . . . Thus he stands as on a 
mountain top, far above the level of his hum- 
ble fellows, and transfigured from his lower 
nature, by reflecting here and there a ray 
from the infinite source of truth." 

Eegarded as a physiological study the fac- 
ulty of speech consists not in uttering words, 
but in the power of word making. The pri- 
mary truth about a word is that it comes only 
from mind. Apart from mind it has no ex- 
istence. Every word was originally made by 
a personality which first designed and in- 
vented it. No personality, no making of a 

» Man's Place in Nature, pp. 119, 132. 
80 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

word is forever true. Hence no word ever 
came, or can come, into existence sponta- 
neously. No human being was ever born with 
a word. A word, therefore, is an artificial hu- 
man product, the outgrowth of a need, just 
as a knife was first made by some one who 
wanted to cut. Being purely human crea- 
tions, words, like all man's works, sooner or 
later grow old and die. Some of the finest 
languages ever spoken are now dead. There- 
fore it is not words as such which concern 
the physiologist, but the capacity for making 
them, for this is the faculty of speech it- 
self. 

This faculty has all the characters of a 
fundamental physiological fact, because it is 
absolutely generic. No speechless race of 
man has yet been found, however low we go 
in the scale of human intelligence, or how- 
ever isolated the race; and every speech of 
savage tribes consists, like every other 
speech, not of so many sounds, but of verbs, 
nouns, and partitives, that is, with all of 
81 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the distinctively mental elements of true 
language. 

Not the least impressive fact about this 
exclusively human , faculty is its limitless 
power of creation. The remarkable excel- 
lence of the languages of many savage races 
is a testimony to the innate power of this 
human endowment. Thus the Turks were 
originally a barbarous horde of High Asia. 
Their language was wholly formed while 
they were so. It is one of the finest, if not 
the finest, sounding languages in the world. 
It has been the least modified by foreign 
influences or admixture of any language in 
Europe. It has never had any literature of 
its own worth mentioning, but this is what 
Max Miiller says of it : ^ " We have before 
us in the Turkish a language of perfectly 
transparent structure, and a grammar, the 
inner workings of which we can study as if 
watching the building of cells in a beehive. 
An eminent Orientalist remarked, that we 

* Science of Language, First Series, p. 309. 

82 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

might imagine Turkish to be the result of the 
deliberations of some famous society of 
learned men. But no such society could have 
devised what the mind of man produced left 
to itself in the steppes of Tartary and guided 
only by its innate laws, or by an intuitive 
power as wonderful as any within the realm 
of Nature." 

Mr. Crisp, in a paper read at the Anthropo- 
logical Section of the British Association of 
Science, August, 1905, said:^ "The Bantu 
languages of Africa will express any idea, 
however esoteric, and will' do it with extraor- 
dinary precision and often with great felicity. 
A foreigner who has acquired one of them 
will often leave his own language to use a 
Bantu word, because it conveys his thought 
more aptly and tersely. Bantu proverbs and 
metaphors are often most incisive, empha- 
sizing with much power and delicacy what it 
is intended to say. They are masters in the 
art of destructive criticism, and their native 

» Nature, Nov. 16, 1905, p. 66. 
83 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

shrewdness, observation and wit render them 
dangerous disputants." 

In the infancy of philology some theorists 
ascribed the beginning of words to phonetic 
imitations of natural sounds. But this bow- 
wow theory, as it has been called, soon died 
after the recognition of the infinite human 
capacity for making languages. As natural 
sounds are the same the world over, if this 
view were correct, some similarity in sound 
should be found in all languages among the 
words so derived, which is by no means the 
case. Even in baby talk, where most we 
would expect to find them, the words vary in 
sound between the different races as much as 
do the words of adults. Thus the word "bow- 
wow," meaning a dog, is found only in Eng- 
lish. Indeed, one might as well trace a navi- 
gable river to a bottle of water, as to sup- 
pose that the inexhaustible stream of human 
speech has any other source than the limitless 
spirit of man, for, owing to that fact, human 
speech is far richer than any one language 
84 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

possibly can be. There is mucb. truth in the 
saying that a man doubles himself when he 
learns a new language. Whoever enters upon 
the study of one of the great languages of 
the East, such as the Arabic, soon notes not 
only how unlike any European tongue it is, 
but that it teems with words and construc- 
tions and meanings which have no equiva- 
lents in any Western speech. 

The necessary conclusion, therefore, which 
the philologist must come to from all these 
facts, is that the source of all words is the 
conscious mind or human personality itself. 
It is not, as some reasoners loosely state, 
that language makes man, but it is man who 
makes language. The mind comes first and 
is altogether the beginning and cause of the 
word. We need to emphasize this primary 
truth lest it escape us when we find that all 
words have their material anatomical seats 
in the brain upon which we can put our index 
finger. Otherwise we might infer that these 
material localities, these speech areas of gray 
85 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

matter, do themselves originate the words 
which are located there. We shall find in- 
stead that the material seats of words in the 
brain matter no more make those words than 
the shelves of a library make the books ar- 
ranged on them. The ultimate fact is rather, 
as revealed by the physiological study of the 
faculty of speech, that words are the instru- 
ments which the thinker invents or makes for 
himself for the purpose of defining his 
thought. Their relations to thought are just 
as definitely instrumental as the violinist's 
fingers are instrumental to the expression of 
his thoughts and feelings with the violin. 
The violinist thinks first in time before a 
finger moves, and the thinker thinks first in 
time before a word rises to his lips. By de- 
grees, however, the mind becomes so habitu- 
ated to think only by using its word instru- 
ments that in adult life thought without 
words becomes almost, if not quite, impossi- 
ble, because in all thinking, as such, the man 
talks to himself in words, whether he will 
S6 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

later talk to others or whether he be thinking 
alone. If any one donbt this, let him try to 
represent a true thought to his consciousness 
without its accompanying words. 

It should be clearly recognized that this 
applies only to thought and not to feelings. 
Thoughts need words to become true 
thoughts, but feelings do not need words to 
become true feelings ; in fact we often vainly 
try to express our feelings in words, and find 
words fail us. We must again disclaim here 
any excursion into the field of metaphysics, 
for as we proceed with our discussion, we 
will meet with illustrations of what will hap- 
pen to an adult 's power of pure thinking upon 
actual material damage to his brain word 
apparatus. When such damage is complete, 
though manifestations of feeling may re- 
main, all recognizable signs of thought are 
gone. 

Having considered the relations of words 
to thoughts, we now come to a crucial point 
in all our discussion, namely, the relations of 
87 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

words to the brain. We can scarcely over- 
state the importance of certain modern dis- 
coveries on this subject, because they reveal 
the first recognizable link between the imma- 
terial and the material, between mind and 
matter, yet demonstrated in science. That 
link never would have been guessed by meta- 
physicians, for it was only physicians who 
could have discovered such facts by their 
noting the effects of small and strictly local- 
ized brain injuries. The simplest way to 
illustrate this statement is to narrate some 
experience of physicians which teach these 
lessons of such extreme interest. 

I was once hurriedly sent for by an old 
patient of mine. I found her much disturbed 
by a strange experience which she imme- 
diately detailed in the well-chosen words of 
an educated woman. "What is the reason, 
Doctor, ' ' she said, ' ' that everything in a book 
or newspaper is illegible to me? Last even- 
ing I sent an advertisement to the Herald for 
a waitress, and when the girls came this morn- 
8$ 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

ing I could not read their references. I then 
took up the Herald and found that I could not 
read a word in it. At first I supposed my 
eyesight had failed, but I could see everything 
around the room as well as ever, and so also 
with my crochet work. I then opened the 
Bible, but could not read a word. Wliat is the 
matter with me ? " I at once recognized that 
she had been struck with word-blindness, as 
this affection is technically termed, and from 
that day to her death, two years later, she 
never saw a word. In a moment of time she 
had become as illiterate as an Australian 
savage, and she remained so. Having calmed 
her excitement as best I could, I was able to 
note that she had absolutely no other disorder 
of speech and none of vision. She heard 
every word that came to her ears, and she 
could speak as fluently as ever, but no word 
could reach her consciousness through her 
eyes. All that which as yet had happened to 
her was that a little artery which supplies 
blood to a small area in the visual region of 
89 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

her brain had become plugged, with the result 
of totally disorganizing the gray matter 
where eye words are registered. The words, 
* ' the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, ' ' 
find their best illustration in that most living 
of things, the brain gray matter, for it imme- 
diately dies if deprived of its supply of 
blood. 

Another example of the total loss of the 
power of recognizing words occurred in a 
hospital patient, but in him it was not words 
that came through the eye, but words that 
came through the ear, which he could not 
recognize, so that he had what is termed 
word-deafness. He was a naturally intelli- 
gent young man under thirty, a clerk in a 
mercantile establishment, and was supposed 
to have become insane, because though he 
talked incessantly, he talked only gibberish, 
and moreover he did not seem able to under- 
stand what was said to him. It was soon 
found, however, that he could read and write 
as well as ever, so that to all questions that 
90 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

were put to him in writing he wrote correct 
answers. The reason why he talked so inco- 
herently was because he could not hear his 
own words, and for the same reason all words 
addressed to his ears reached his conscious- 
ness only as sounds, but were otherwise as 
unintelligible to him as the words of a lan- 
guage which he had never heard. It was 
also words only that he could not hear, for he 
heard and recognized all other sounds, in- 
cluding the tick of a watch and the notes of a 
canary bird. Such cases of word-deafness 
are due to the same kind of damage to a small 
locality in the auditory area of the brain as 
that which causes word-blindness in the visual 
area. 

A third form of loss of words is still more 
common. A man retires to bed in good 
health, but is found in the morning utterly 
unable to speak a word. It is soon ascer- 
tained that he has no word-deafness, for he 
evidently understands everything that is 
spoken to him, and that he has no word- 
91 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

blindness, because lie can read. But he may 
not be able to utter a word, still less a sen- 
tence. In his distress, he may make signs 
that he would like to write, but even if he can 
hold a pen well and begin to write, it is usu- 
ally found that he cannot find the words to 
express himself by writing any more than he 
can by speaking. 

Thus it is that processes of disease enable 
us to analyze our brain mechanism of speech 
with all the precision of well-devised experi- 
ments. By this means we learn, as otherwise 
we could not, that speech is of two kinds. 
The first kind consists of words which come 
to us, and these are words which arrive 
through the ear, and then go to a particular 
locality in what is called the first temporal 
convolution, which is in the cortical area of 
hearing, where they are received as words; 
and the second consists of words which come 
to us through the eye in reading, and which 
go to an entirely different place from the ear 
words, for they are received as words in a 
92 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

special locality called the angular gyrus in 
the cortical visual area. It is to be remem- 
bered that there is no resemblance whatever 
between the sound of the word man, for exam- 
ple, and the written word man, for sound and 
sight are two wholly separate things; and 
hence sound words and sight words have each 
their different brain registries. Modern in- 
vention has doubtless added a third word reg- 
istry connected with the sense of touch, by 
which the blind are enabled to read, but its 
special locality has not yet been identi- 
fied. 

The second kind of speech consists of words 
which go from us, or which we ourselves 
utter. This division of the faculty of speech 
is wholly different from the first, because in 
that we are passive and receive the words, 
while in this we are active and ourselves give 
forth the words. We do this either by word 
of mouth or by word of hand in writing, and 
to thus express ourselves an entirely distinct 
mechanism is required, because it involves 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

muscular movements. It is therefore called 
motor speech, and proceeds from an alto- 
gether different place in the brain cortex, in 
a region from which muscular movements are 
initiated, particularly in those regions which 
govern the movements of the tongue and 
other muscles of articulation, and which are 
also in proximity to the motor areas govern- 
ing the hands. Here in a small patch of gray 
matter, not larger than a hazel nut,^ located 
in a part of a convolution called Broca's con- 
volution, from the French surgeon who first 
identified its connection with speech, resides 
every word that can be spoken! Let this 
remarkable piece of matter be separately 
destroyed, as it often is by a gush of blood 
from a ruptured artery, and the consciousness 
is utterly unable to find a word with which 
to express itself. It still may have its power 
to receive all words from others through the 
ear or eye, but not a word can it communicate 

Rosenstein, quoted by Sir Wm. Gowers : Diseases of the 
Nervous System, vol. ii., p. 115, 2d Edition, 1901. 

94 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

in return. These different derangements of 
speech, due to organic changes in the word 
mechanism, are technically called aphasias, 
and divided into the sensory forms, when eye 
or ear words are deranged, or motor aphasia, 
when Broca's convolution is damaged. 

Now, as we have remarked before, the gray 
matter of no one of these three seats of words 
originates or makes any words. They are 
simply registered there for use, as they would 
be on a printed page, or on a wax leaf of a 
phonograph, and how that is done we will 
learn further on. 

We have already likened those speech areas 
to the shelves of a library, with words ar- 
ranged thereon like so many volumes, and 
that something very similar to this is actually 
the case, is demonstrated by facts such as 
these. When a man sets about to learn a 
language new to him, he has to add another 
brain shelf for that purpose, because the old 
shelf has too many books on it to allow any 
room for a row of entirely new words. Pro- 
95 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

fessor Hinslielwood,^ of the University of 
Glasgow, publishes the case of a highly edu- 
cated man who was brought to him for an 
attack of ordinary word-blindness. He could 
read his native English in print only with the 
greatest difficulty, and words in writing 
scarcely at all. As Dr. Hinshelwood was told 
that the patient had learned Greek, Latin and 
French, he first tested him with Greek, when 
the patient was surprised and delighted to 
find that he could read Greek perfectly, as he 
did paragraphs in Homer, Thucydides and 
Xenophon. Then testing his Latin, he could 
read it far better than he could English, but 
not as perfectly as Greek, while in French he 
made more mistakes than in Latin, but still 
read it a great deal better than he could his 
native English. The only explanation, of 
course, of this case is that the injury to his 
brain matter nearly ruined the English shelf, 
then damaged to a less extent the French, and 

* Lancet, Feb. 8, 1902. Also his book, Letter, Word and 
Mind Blindness, London, 1901. 

96 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

still less the Latin shelf, while the Greek shelf 
escaped entirely. 

The same arrangement holds true also in 
the auditory word mechanism. Dr. Hinshel- 
wood reports the case of a Frenchman who 
made his living in Glasgow as a teacher of 
French for a number of years, during which 
he learned English. After returning to his 
native country he had a stroke of apoplexy, 
from which he became word-deaf in French, 
while his English shelf remained intact so 
that his wife could speak to him, but only in 
English. 

These cerebral library shelves may also be 
partially, instead of completely, damaged by 
accidents to the brain, with results not unlike 
those which often disturb the equanimity of 
a student when the house-cleaning season ar- 
rives, and women invade his study for a gen- 
eral dusting of his books. For days after- 
wards he picks up the wrong book, because 
it has been put back where it does not belong. 
So, after some brain shock, a person may be 
97 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

able to speak, but the wrong word often vexa- 
tiously comes to his lips, just as if his Broca 
shelves had become badly jumbled. To this 
condition the term paraphasia is given. 

There may be shelves in these cerebral 
libraries, however, for other things than 
words. Professor Edgren of Stockholm has 
published the records of a number of patients 
who had lost the power of reading music, 
though they could still read words, that is, 
they became music note-blind instead of word- 
blind. In Dr. Hinshelwood's patient men- 
tioned above, who could read Greek but not 
English, the reverse took place, for he could 
still read music as well as ever, though he 
could not read a sentence in English. 

The most interesting, however, of these 
separate registries is that for figures. As 
the damage to the speech apparatus often 
involves more than one registry, the follow- 
ing record of a case in my own experience is 
of interest, because it proves that if only one 
of the three speech mechanisms remain un- 
98 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

injured, the personality can use that one 
sufficiently well for all practical purposes. 
A gentleman who during a long, active busi- 
ness career had accumulated a fortune, had 
an attack of apoplexy which, while causing no 
muscular paralysis, yet made him both word- 
blind and wholly unable to utter a word. He 
remained in this condition for seven years, 
but what brought him to my office, in company 
with his lawyer and only son, was that my 
opinion was sought as to his competence to 
make a will. His lawyer produced one in 
which the patient devised a certain amount 
of property, consisting of pieces of real es- 
tate and of other items, each very definitely 
mentioned, to his married daughter, which 
was, in the testator's opinion, a very fair 
division of his property between his two chil- 
dren. His manufacturing business, however, 
he devised exclusively to his son. Learning 
that his son-in-law was dissatisfied with this 
arrangement, and might induce his wife to 
contest her father's will after his death by a 
99 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

claim to a share in the profits of the factory, 
on the ground that in his condition he was 
incapable of making a will, he came to me as 
an expert to give my written opinion on the 
subject. It was naturally felt by his son and 
his lawyer that a very plausible case might 
be made out to the jury by the other side, 
that a man who could not himself read a word 
of his will, nor utter a sound by which he 
could express what he wanted, might easily 
be imposed upon by the persons interested to 
do so. In my examination of him it was 
found that though he could not read, and like- 
wise could not write, as his utterance speech 
mechanism was wholly ruined, yet he could 
both read and write figures as well as ever, 
in fact that he was unusually adept in all 
arithmetical calculations. Meantime nothing 
could persuade him to retire from business, 
and so for seven years he continued to buy 
and sell as he always had done, for he wrote 
the sums for all transactions and pointing to 
the figures with his pencil, the bargain had 
100 



THE FACULTY OP SPEECH 

to be forthwith concluded. In illustration he 
produced a memorandum book of his, in which 
were entered numerous such accounts, par- 
ticularly directing my attention by his finger 
to one of them in which he had bought a third 
interest in a business enterprise, and in 
which he had entered all payments correctly 
on that basis, the sums varying according to 
the year's profits. As questions relating to 
the testamentary capacity of aphasics have 
come up in many courts of both Europe and 
America, quite a literature has grown up on 
this subject, and I proceeded to test this par- 
ticular case according to its accepted rules. 
I took the will and looked it carefully over be- 
fore him, and then read it aloud, item by 
item, to each of which he nodded assent, until 
I designedly misread one stipulation as in 
favor of the son when it was actually in favor 
of the daughter. The old gentleman was 
furious at my supposed mistake, and was 
quick to correct any other inaccuracies in my 
reading, however minor in importance they 
101 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

were. I therefore could give a decided opin- 
ion that he was entirely competent to devise 
a will, and I was glad to learn afterwards 
that this precautionary measure on his part 
prevented any trouble in settling the estate 
when he died some months afterwards. The 
place for registering figures is doubtless 
somewhere in the visual area of the cortex, 
but in his case so removed from the eye- 
word registry that it escaped damage as 
completely as his ear-word mechanism had 
done. 

Meantime this patient had repeatedly tried 
to learn to speak and to read again after the 
sudden onset of his calamity, but though he 
endeavored with characteristic perseverance 
to get back some of the lost parts of his 
speech, yet he failed altogether. Mentally he 
was just the same, and his personality with 
all its peculiarities remained the same, but 
those particular chords of the instrument 
were irretrievably broken. Why he could not 
substitute another set of precisely similar 
102 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

chords which he had in his brain, and which 
also were perfectly intact, we will explain in 
the next chapter, because that explanation 
covers the whole subject of how we talk 
at all. 



103 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FACULTY OF SPEECH — CONTINUED 

It should be noted first of all that no part of 
the human brain has any original, that is, 
native connection with the gift of speech. 
The material seat or region in the brain of 
this great faculty comes always as an ac- 
quired change in the brain, for no one ever 
was born with it. Hence at birth speech has 
no place or locality whatever in either hemi- 
sphere. We may even go so far as to say that 
if the distinguishing fact about man is that 
he is a speaking animal, this is not owing to 
the structure of his brain, for not only has 
the chimpanzee just the same convolutions 
which man has for speech, but like the chim- 
panzee, man has the same convolutions in 
pairs, that is, in both hemispheres. And yet 
man uses only one of these pairs for speech, 

ro4 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

while the same set of convolutions in his 
other hemisphere is no more used for speech 
than either pair is used for that purpose by 
the chimpanzee. If, therefore, the word fac- 
ulty was an original endowment of those 
word areas in man, on account of their par- 
ticular construction, those areas being just 
alike in each hemisphere, then both hemi- 
spheres would be used for speech. Instead of 
this being the case, the entire word mechan- 
ism in all its parts is found only in one of the 
two hemispheres, while the other hemisphere 
remains wordless for life. 

With the great majority of persons the 
speech centers are located exclusively in the 
left hemisphere. It is a part of the left supe- 
rior temporal convolution which hears words ; 
it is a part of the left angular gyrus which 
sees words ; and it is the left Broca's convolu- 
tion which utters words. In all such persons 
the corresponding places in the right hemi- 
sphere are not speech areas at all. 

It would be natural to infer from all this 
105 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

that the left brain is organized differently 
from the right brain as far as this supreme 
endowment is concerned. But it is not so, 
for the good reason that in some persons the 
speech centers are in the right brain alone, 
and it is their left brains which are the word- 
less ones. Moreover such persons are not a 
whit inferior to the others in everything 
which language demands. 

Therefore, again, it is not brain structure, 
nor organization, nor locality, nor brain cells 
or fibers, nor any similar thing which is the 
first cause of word making. That first cause 
is something wholly different, namely, an 
agency, or rather agent, which visits these 
brain localities, and finding them originally 
entirely unfamiliar with a single word of any 
kind, proceeds by a long and incessant repe- 
tition process of teaching, to fashion those 
particles of gray matter to do what he pro- 
poses, here to receive words and there to 
utter words. How he manages to do this is 
revealed by his original reason for choosing 
106 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

the left brain in most persons, but in others 
not the left but the right brain. 

The facts which led to the discovery of the 
first steps in the formation of the word mech- 
anism in man were that it was noted that 
when sudden paralysis occurs on one side 
of the body, if it be the right side which is 
paralyzed, the side which is governed by the 
left brain motor or uttering speech is also 
very commonly affected. The reason for this 
is that Broca's convolution, which contains 
the center for motor speech, as we have 
already explained, is situated in that part 
of the cortex which is called the motor area, 
because from that area proceed those excita- 
tions of muscular movements which are of a 
voluntary kind. A powerful spurt of blood 
from a ruptured cerebral artery may so tear 
the brain tissue as to involve these motor 
centers or the fibers leading from them, and 
in so doing frequently involves Broca's con- 
volution among the rest. Post-mortem ex- 
aminations fully confirm this statement. 
107 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

Meantime as the right hemisphere is then 
found to be quite unaffected, including the 
right Broca's convolution, it is plain that the 
loss of speech is due exclusively to the injury 
to the left hemisphere. 

On the other hand, while loss of speech or- 
dinarily accompanies right-sided, but not 
left-sided paralysis, some cases have been re- 
ported in which it accompanied left-sided, 
and not right-sided paralysis. In time more 
of these cases were published, along with the 
significant post-mortem findings of damage 
to the right instead of the left Broca's convo- 
lution. In other instances, in patients who, 
with left-sided paralysis and loss of motor 
speech, had also showed word-blindness dur- 
ing life, not only the right Broca's convolu- 
tion, but the region of the right angular f .^ 
gyrus was likewise found damaged. As the 
corresponding places in the left hemisphere 
were intact, it followed that in these persons 
the speech centers were in the right brain 
and not in the left. 

108 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

It was not long before this seemingly 
curious anomaly found its explanation, 
which is that right-sided paralysis with loss 
of speech occurs in right-handed people, and 
left-sided paralysis with loss of speech occurs 
in persons who have been left-handed in life. 
In other words, the faculty of speech is 
located in the hemisphere which governs the 
hand which is most used. Hand and speech, 
therefore, are physiologically connected. 

This remarkable fact brings us back to the 
origin, to the very beginning of this wonder- 
ful faculty of expression in man. It began 
b}^ one personality longing to communicate 
with others, and the first thing which he 
did then, as every human being still does 
when endeavoring to communicate with those 
/ whose vocal speech he does not know, was to 
make gestures with his hands. Gesture lan- 
guage, therefore, was the first language, and 
few persons are aware how much gesture 
language still continues in living use. This 
is particularly noticeable among all peoples 
109 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

who have no written language; but even 
among the most civilized, whole races are 
characterized by the number and variety of 
their gestures while speaking, quite as much 
as by their vocabulary. A non-gesticulating 
Frenchman is as uncommon as a taciturn 
Frenchman. One has to learn two languages 
among the Arabs, for nothing can exceed the 
expressiveness and piquancy of those ges- 
tures by which they often more than double 
the meaning of their words. 

The important place which gesture lan- 
guage holds among primitive peoples is well 
illustrated by the following anecdote: Dr. 
Walter Eoth, in the preface to his Ethnologi- 
cal Studies of the Northwestern Queensland 
(Australia) Aborigines, says: ''I was out 
on horseback with some blacks, when one of 
the boys riding by my side suddenly asked 
me to halt, as a mate of his in front was after 
some emus, consisting of a hen bird and her 
young progeny. As there had been appa- 
rently to me no communication whatsoever 
110 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

between the boy in front and the one close to 
me, separated as tliey were by a distance of 
quite one hundred and fifty yards, I naturally 
concluded that my informant was uttering a 
falsehood, and told him so in pretty plain 
terms, with the result, that after certain 
mutual recriminations, he explained, on his 
hands, how he had received his information, 
the statement to be shortly afterwards con- 
firmed by the arrival of the lad himself with 
the dead bird and some of the young in ques- 
tion. ... I afterwards found that there is 
an actual well-defined sign language which 
extends through the entire Northwestern dis- 
tricts of Queensland." 

Among our staid Anglo-Saxons a preacher 
like Whitfield moved his audience more by 
what they saw him do with the muscles of his 
face and of his hands than by the words he 
uttered, for those words we have in his 
printed sermons, and we wonder at the effect 
they had on his hearers. His voice certainly 
could not account for the whole difference. 
Ill 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

An inspection of the accompanying plate 
shows in what close proximity to the area 
governing the movements of the hand in the 
motor region of the brain are the centers 
which preside over the movements of the 
muscles of the face, of the lips and of the 
tongue. A common and associated action of 
these parts, therefore, would be much more 
natural than between the muscles of the face, 
for example, and those of the leg. We can 
then see how readily facial expression, lend- 
ing itself to gesture in attempts at communi- 
cation, would seek the co-operation of lips 
and tongue for vocal sounds, soon to become 
words because of the human mind back of the 
sounds. This last element of mind, as we will 
note later, is indispensable, because other- 
wise the sounds would have remained for- 
ever only like those of an anthropoid ape. 

But as the right hand is the oftenest used 

for every purpose, so is it of the two hands 

the oftenest used for gesture, which means 

of course for language. As soon as other 

112 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

parts were sought for to co-operate with ges- 
ture in language, the appeal would neces- 
sarily be to the neighboring centers in the 
left brain, and not by crossing the corpus 
callosum bridge to the corresponding centers 
in the other hemisphere. It would not be 
long, therefore, before the habit became set- 
tled to use only parts in the left brain for 
this specialized work, until finally the habit 
became fixed for life. 

Why some people are left-handed we do 
not know. The discussion on the origin of 
right-handedness and left-handedness comes 
down to us from ancient times and is ever 
renewed. Scarcely a month passes without 
it being all threshed out again in our medical 
journals. But the primary connection of the 
hand with the fashioning of the word mech- 
anism in the human brain is conclusively 
settled by the location of that mechanism in 
the right hemisphere in left-handed persons. 
Whence, therefore, the impulses mostly pro- 
ceed for using the particular hand in ques- 
113 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tion settles both to wliat cerebral places 
words are to go, and from what place they 
are to come. 

So far we have been led by anatomical 
facts. Thus, Broca's convolution is no more 
a theory than a finger is, for it is a definite 
material thing. But what makes Broca's 
convolution talk? Evidently not simply be- 
cause it is Broca 's convolution, because there 
is another Broca's convolution within the 
same cranium which does not talk. 

This question, which really concerns the 
origin of human speech, is not best answered 
by studying speech in children and noting 
how they begin. Many reasoners go astray 
here, because with preconceived views about 
the automatic origin of words, which children 
are supposed to learn by imitation, they 
wholly ignore the anatomical brain changes 
which are necessary to make speech, and 
what it is which causes them. If they are 
studied it will then appear that these anatom- 
ical changes cannot possibly be of automatic 
114 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

origin, but rather must be the effects and re- 
sults of purpose. The best age, therefore, 
for starting this investigation is when the 
subject begins to learn to read. 

The ability to read constitutes an impor- 
tant department of language, and no human 
race has yet been found which cannot be 
taught to read if the attempt be made early 
enough in life. Thus Bishop Hale, of Perth, 
W. A. (in his Aborigines of Australia), men- 
tions that " A shepherd, Adams, has taken 
to wife a native woman, who had been 
brought up at some settler's station and was 
partially educated. Adams could not read, 
and the black wife taught the white husband 
to read." 

It is no longer doubtful that every race of 
man can be educated to know anything, from 
reading and writing to mathematics, philos- 
ophy and political economy. In other words 
man is always and everywhere man, and in- 
finitely distant in mind from every ape. Some 
early anthropologists were mistaken enough 
115 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

to say that certain races of men were too low 
in the scale to be able to count above five, the 
number of their fingers, and they cited some 
tribes among the Australian savages as ex- 
amples. We need only quote the following 
as to the actual facts. 

Mr. James Dawson, in his Australian 
Aborigines, published in Melbourne in 1881, 
records the following remarkable evidence: 
''The inspection of the aboriginal school 
at Ramahyuck, in Gippsland, during the 
past eleven years, gets a percentage of 
results higher than the other state (white) 
schools in Victoria, and while no doubt this 
excellence is largely due to the regularity 
with which the children attend school, and to 
the skill and zeal of the gentlemen who teach 
them, it fairly shows that aboriginal children 
are at least equal to others in power of learn- 
ing those branches of education which are 
taught in the state schools of Victoria. On 
several occasions of examination by a gov- 
ernment inspector, the percentage of the 
116 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

Eamahyuck school was a hundred, a result 
unparalleled by any other school in the 
colony. ' ' ^ 

Now no one can imagine that learning to 
read can be automatic. It requires instead 
the most persevering attention and applica- 
tion for many months. Over and over again 
the pictures of the separate letter have to be 
identified so as to be distinguished from one 
another, and then their combination into 
words successively mastered till the word 
symbol and its meaning are simultaneously 
recognized. This process of brain shaping 
has to be done piece by piece, or layer by 
layer, so that some persons become word- 
blind without being letter-blind. But a less 
spontaneous cerebral act than this can 
scarcely be conceived. If it is not wholly the 
doing of what we call will, then what is it! 
But the most pregnant fact about this pro- 

^ See article, The Position of the Australian Aborigines 
in the Scale of Human Intelligence, by the Hon. J. 
Mildred Creed, in the Nineteenth Century Magazine, January, 
1905. 

117 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

cess of learning to read is that by the con- 
stant repetition of the will-directed effort to 
see the letter and word pictures, an actual 
modification of gray matter results in a 
limited portion of the visual area, so that it 
can do what no other gray matter anywhere 
can do, — see and recognize words. 

Here, surely, we come upon a most im- 
pressive fact, namely, that by constant repe- 
tition of a given stimulus, we can etfect a 
permanent anatomical change in our brain 
stuff, which will add a specific and remarka- 
ble cerebral function to that place, which it 
never had before, and which, therefore, it 
could not have had either originally or spon- 
taneously. This material change must be 
there, though no microscope will ever detect 
it, or identify the English reading from the 
French reading cells, in one who can read 
both languages, but yet there it must be, or 
a blood clot could not destroy it. But this 
material change was not effected easily; 
rather it came only by laborious and long con- 
118 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

tinned work spent on that collection of gray 
matter, and work by something which mnst 
be wholly extraneous to the gray matter , 
itself. It is absurd to suppose that any other 
areas of the cortex which cannot of them- 
selves recognize a letter or word, are the 
teachers of the cells in the angular gyrus 
which do the reading. It is the conscious per- 
sonality alone which does this work, and no 
better proof of this is needed to show that 
such must be the process than when, in later 
years, a student learns to read Greek, Latin 
and French, as did Dr. Hinshelwood's patient 
above cited. When that man separately 
studied those three languages, in addition 
to his childhood's speech, his consciousness 
and his will certainly co-operated in pro- 
longed exercise, until wholly distinct portions 
of his gray matter were fashioned, one for 
Greek, another for Latin, and another for 
French words, each so divided from each 
other and from the earlier English stratum, 
that they were respectively differently 
119 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

affected by the damage which involved this 
word area. 

We must here pause in our discussion, be- 
cause we have come to a great principle 
which goes to the foundation of everything 
nervous, from the nervous system of a polyp 
up to the brain of a philosopher. That prin- 
ciple is this: That a stimulus to nervous 
matter effects a change in that matter by 
calling forth a reaction in it. This change may 
be exceedingly slight after the first stimulus, 
but each repetition of the stimulus increases 
the change, with its following specific re- 
action, until by constant repetition a perma- 
nent alteration in the nervous matter stimu- 
lated occurs, which produces a fixed habitual 
way of working in it. In other words, the 
nervous matter acquires a special way of 
working, that is, of function, by habit. We 
will find this principle constantly illustrated 
and operative in many ways as we proceed; 
but what concerns us now is that already, 
from the facts which we have been review- 
120 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

ing, we arrive at one of the most important 
of all conclusions, namely, that the gray 
layer of our brains is actually plastic and 
capable of being fashioned. It need not be 
left with only the slender equipment of func- 
tions which Nature gives it at birth. Instead, 
it can be fashioned artificially, that is, by 
education, so that it may acquire very many 
new functions or capacities which never come 
by birth nor by inheritance, but which can be 
stamped upon it as so many physical altera- 
tions in its proplasmic substance. All this 
is demonstrated beyond cavil, by the textural 
brain changes which the acquired and not 
congenital function of speech depends upon. 
This well-demonstrated truth is of far- 
reaching significance, because it gives an en- 
tirely new aspect to the momentous subject 
of Education. Most persons conceive of edu- 
cation vaguely as only mental, a training of 
the mind as such, with small thought that it 
involves physical changes in the brain itself 
ere it can become real and permanent. But 
121 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

we have seen that different forms of educa- 
tion, as perfect examples of education as can 
be named, are ultimately dependent upon the 
sound condition of certain portions of the 
gray matter which have been " educated " 
for each work. Thus to read music requires 
a great deal of education, and an apoplectic 
clot may instantly deprive a person of a 
laboriously gained power to read music, or 
such an accident may spoil every other kind 
of reading, and yet leave the music-reading 
place unharmed. What a burden of school 
days arithmetic was every one remembers, 
but in those same days figures were deeply 
engraved in some part of the angular gyrus, 
so that, as in the case mentioned on page 99, 
when all other reading cells were ruined, they 
remained as clear as ever for their owner's 
use. Or, again, they may be spoiled while the 
reading of music notes remains. So writing, 
which heretofore has been regarded as a 
form of Broca's convolution work, because 
usually when this convolution is damaged 
122 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

speech by mouth and speech by hand are both 
abolished, very probably has a center of its 
own, since cases are reported where the in- 
dividual could not speak but could write. 
Some investigators claim to have identified 
the writing center in a part of the motor area 
above Broca's convolution.^ 

From all this it follows that the brain must 
be modified by every process of true special 
education. A skilled violinist can play upon 
his instrument as easily as another can read 
a book. But how did he acquire such an ac- 
complishment? Without doubt by actually 
fashioning a special violin center in his brain, 
as reading cells are fashioned, by the same 
laborious iteration of exercise of those par- 
ticular brain cells, until they had to become 
violin music cells. And so with every handi- 
craft. Instances which prove this have been 
reported of mechanics, who after an apoplec- 
tic attack, have had their right hand sud- 

' Prof. C. K. Mills, Am. Jour. Med. Sciences, September, 
1904. 

123 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

denly but permanently lose its cunning, while 
but little else or nothing seemed to be lost. 

Meantime one fact about the plasticity of 
the matter of the human brain cortex, in 
other words, its educability, is that this plas- 
ticity diminishes progressively with age. 
This is much more evident with certain brain 
functions than with others, but is particu- 
larly the case with the acquisition of lan- 
guage. Children under ten years of age 
acquire languages by the ear very easily; 
that is, the gray matter of their word centers 
is very plastic and can soon be fashioned for 
that purpose. But what is gained easily is 
lost easily, for if a child at that age be re- 
moved to another country, where he no 
longer hears the language which he has 
learned, he generally forgets it totally in less 
than two years. On the other hand, many 
cases are reported of children becoming 
aphasic just as adults do, by the onset of 
right-sided paralysis with destruction of the 
left Broca's convolution, and yet they gradu- 
124 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

ally learn to talk again in much the same 
fashion in which they acquired speech at first. 
That they do this by educating the centers 
in the right brain is proved by parallel cases 
of the supervention afterwards of total 
aphasia, when left-sided paralysis was added 
to their former right-sided paralysis, i. e., by 
a second injury involving the right centers. 

Facts of this kind have led some writers 
to draw the erroneous conclusion that both 
hemispheres are concerned in speech, so that 
if the word centers of one side are injured, 
those of the other hemisphere can come to the 
patient's help. The chief argument for their 
position is the transitory character of loss of 
speech in certain persons affected with 
aphasia. In a few weeks they recover their 
ability to read or speak as the case may be, 
and it is therefore argued that they do so by 
help from the centers in the unaffected hemi- 
sphere. But it does not seem to occur to 
these reasoners that, if so, then every case of 
aphasia from injury in one hemisphere 
125 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

should soon be recovered from by the aid of 
the other hemisphere. But the facts are that 
in the great majority of cases in adults, if the 
aphasia does not improve within a few 
months, certainly within a year, it never im- 
proves. My shrewd patient who retained his 
arithmetic so well took many a lesson for six 
years with all the assiduity of an industrious 
schoolboy, and yet he never got back a word 
in his left angular gyrus, nor in his left 
Broca's convolution, nor of course in the 
right word centers. The most probable ex- 
planation of temporary aphasia and recovery 
or improvement from it is, that the sudden 
injury causes a shock, and thus paralysis of 
the word centers, but not complete disorgan- 
ization of them, so that in time they regain 
their functions, rather than that the struc- 
tures in the other hemisphere — which had not 
for years been taught a word of English any 
more than of Chinese — should in a few weeks 
be able to read or speak. The older the 
patient is, the more hopeless the case, simply 
126 



THE FACULTY OP SPEECH 

because the unaffected word areas in the 
other hemisphere have passed the time of life 
when the gray matter is plastic enough to be 
fashioned for any new complex function, A 
healthy man after forty scarcely ever learns 
a new language well; after fifty such in- 
stances are of the rarest ; and at seventy the 
best that can be expected is the mastery of a 
very few foreign phrases, and badly pro- 
nounced at that. We need not dwell further 
on this subject, for it is simply in keeping 
with the facts connected with any other men- 
tal acquirement which comes only by educa- 
tion. A physician needs many years to get 
his education, and who would expect him at 
fifty or sixty to become a civil engineer'? 

Our study of the cerebral relations of the 
faculty of speech serves one purpose at least, 
namely, that of revealing the great fact that 
man can be educated and does educate him- 
self by modifying his brain for that purpose. 
It is this fact which makes man what he is — • 
man. But for the purpose of our discussion, 
127 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

it is so important to be able to recognize 
clearly how our brain matter can be made to 
acquire wholly new functions, and according 
to what fundamental principles of nervous 
physiology it does so, that we must for the 
present diverge from the subject of educa- 
tion to that of the great laws governing all 
nervous development. Above everything 
else modern science is indebted to the recog- 
nition of the principle of evolution as the 
chief guide to the understanding of the 
deeper problems of life. By this is meant 
that all life development, and certainly all 
nervous development, has been orderly; 
which, in turn, means that from the begin- 
ning, however low, to the end, however high, 
certain fundamental laws continuously oper- 
ate. We, therefore, can best unravel the 
most complex forms by studying the com- 
mencement in the simplest forms; well as- 
sured that if we never drop the line of con- 
tinuity it will be our clue through the most 
intricate passages of our search. We will 
128 



THE FACULTY OF SPEECH 

then find that as we approach the subject of 
the brain of man in its relation to thought 
by another route entirely than that which we 
have been following, namely, by the route 
which leads from below upwards, we will ar- 
rive all the more certainly at the conclusions 
to which we have been so far tending, with 
all the added confirmation given by the con- 
vergence of independent lines of research. 
We proceed, therefore, in the next chapter 
to the consideration of the great laws which 
preside over the evolution of a nervous 
system. 



129 



CHAPTEE VII 

EVOLUTIOISr OF A NEKVOUS SYSTEM 

Ceetaust fundamental principles are always 
found underlying the essential phenomena of 
life, which, first recognizable in the most 
primitive, prove afterwards to be just as 
operative in the most developed forms. The 
greatest growths, for example, in either the 
vegetable or animal kingdoms, a towering 
oak or an immense whale, have to begin like 
every other living thing as veritable microbes 
in a single microscopic cell. The inner struc- 
ture of that cell itself has certain invariable 
elements which are equally present in the first 
vegetable and in the first animal cell. Thus 
every species of plant or animal contains in 
its first cell a fixed, specific, and always even 
number of bodies called chromosomes, be- 
cause they can take a dye, and this number 
130 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

regularly recurs in all the subsequent cells 
of the future body, though they be millions. 
Thus in the cells of the mouse, the salaman- 
der, the trout and the lily, the chromosomes 
always number twenty-four. In the ox, the 
guinea pig, in man and in the onion, the chro- 
mosomes always number sixteen. In the 
shark the number is thirty-six; in the grass- 
hopper twelve, and so on. It is from such 
facts, and others like them, that the eminent 
naturalist, Von Naegeli, was led to say that 
all life is one. 

But nowhere is the steady sway of funda- 
mental principles so illustrated as in the de- 
velopment of a nervous system. From the 
first beginnings of a nervous system in a 
polyp up to the marvelous brain of man, cer- 
tain primary laws are always operative, with- 
out their ever being afterwards repealed or 
superseded. If, therefore, we are to under- 
stand the complex, we first must study the 
simplest organization, well assured that what 
is illustrated by it will continue recognizable 
131 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

in every further development, however great 
or manifold. 

In studying the development of a nervous 
system from a physiological point of view, 
the first principle discernible as governing 
that development is what in any other con- 
nection we would term Discipline, and we can- 
not do better than to note how the concep- 
tions suggested by that word are applicable 
to our subject. 

One of the definitions given in Webster of 
the word " discipline " is " subjection to 
rule, submission to order and control, by 
severe systematic training." The central 
idea conveyed by this definition is that dis- 
cipline in no way represses activity, but 
directs it, by means of regulated restraint. 
"Without activity there could be no discipline, 
for there would be nothing then to discipline. 
The word, therefore, implies some kind of 
energy, made to subserve some purpose 
which it would not effect unless it be put 
imder control. 

132 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

But in its usual and most correct sense, 
discipline is not a word which can be applied 
to any inanimate force. It is an exclusively 
nervous system word. You cannot properly 
say that you will discipline your watch if it 
goes too fast, though you can say that you 
will regulate it. Nor can you properly say 
that you have disciplined the energy of 
steam, when you have made it subserve your 
purpose by putting it under control in an 
engine. It must always be something nerv- 
ous that is disciplined, so that even in the 
bodies of the highest animals, nothing but 
that which is nervous can be either disci- 
plined or trained. 

This may seem a singular statement to 
some, as they think of the highly trained mus- 
cles of the legs of a dancer or the fingers of 
a pianist. But it is not the muscles in these 
cases, but the motor nerves of the muscles, 
which have been so wonderfully disciplined. 
For neither of these instances of supposed 
muscle training can be compared for com- 
133 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

plexity and difficulty with the training of the 
muscular organ, the tongue, for the move- 
ments necessary for articulate speech. An 
animated orator has to make a greater num- 
ber of rapidly succeeding and yet perfectly 
adjusted contractions and relaxations of his 
muscles of articulation, than any famous per- 
former on a musical instrument. But how 
shall we explain the authenticated case of a 
man who could speak English, French and 
German, and who suddenly became unable, 
from an attack of right hemiplegia, or paraly- 
sis on the right side of his body, to make his 
tongue work out a word in any one of the 
three languages? 

"What was the matter with his tongue? 
Nothing, as a muscle or muscular organ. In 
fact it could work as well as ever in assist- 
ing mastication and swallowing. Why, 
therefore, could it not talk? Solely because 
its nervous direction for the movements in 
speaking was lost, while its nervous direction 
for the movements of mastication was re- 
134 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

tained. But if its pair of hypoglossal nerves 
were also cut, just as tlie accident which had 
caused his hemiplegia had severed the con- 
/ nection with the higher brain centers, then 
the tongue would have failed equally to assist 
in mastication and in deglutition. It is a 
mistake, therefore, to say that muscles, as 
such, can be taught to do anything. Nothing 
can be taught except that which is nervous. 

This principle is far-reaching, because 
among other things it introduces us to a sec- 
ond element of fundamental importance and 
which is characteristic of the nervous sys- 
tem alone, namely, that of gradation of rank 
in work or function. Every tissue of the 
body, except the nervous tissue, has but one 
dead level of function. No one bone or bone 
cell has any higher rank than another bone or 
bone cell, any more than one brick in a build- 
ing is of a higher or more important grade 
than another brick, simply because it is put 
above or below. And so muscles are little 
else than duplicates of each other in function, 
135 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

because, wherever they are, they will be 
found to do but one thing, namely, contract 
and relax, and 'nothing more. There is, there- 
fore, no such thing in the muscles as one set 
governing another set by virtue of pure in- 
nate superiority, as the rider is superior to 
his horse. The horse might claim against his 
rider the greater importance, because he 
does all the going, and so he might if he were 
like his rider, and not a broken-in horse. But 
just this difference meets us in the case of 
the gray motor cells of the spinal cord and 
the gray motor cells of the surface of the 
brain. The gray motor cells of the cord do 
all the going of the body, for even the so- 
called cranial motor nerves really belong to 
its system. Not a muscle of the body is 
directly under the control of those aristo- 
cratic motor cells in the topmost layer of the 
brain. The cord might say to the brain, ' ' If 
you wish to move hand or foot you have to 
ask me to do it for you. " ' ' Very well, then, 
do it, ' ' is the brain 's answer, ' ' but don 't you 
136 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

move hand or foot till I tell you, for since I 
have been evolnted up here, you have lost 
your senseless independence and must obey 
me. You were the original nervous system, 
to be sure, just as there were horses before 
there were men to ride them, but since I have 
come, I am above and you are below, and, as 
it is, it took me long patient training and a 
great deal of trouble to break you in to my 
service, so that you would act according to 
my orders." 

Eank, however, always implies an ultimate 
below, from which everything starts as a 
common foundation for all subsequent grada- 
tions, and so we will begin now with the 
simplest illustration of what a nervous sys- 
tem is. Reduced to its most primitive form, 
as it is in the lowest animals which show a 
trace of a nervous system, it is proved to 
consist of three parts: (1) A nerve filament 
which receives and transmits a stimulus to 
(2) a nerve center of soft gray cells and 
fibers, which receive this stimulus, and which 
137 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

center reacts to this stimulus, never on the 
nerve which brought it, but on (3) a nerve 
filament which proceeds from the center. 

Hence these two filaments are accordingly 
named, the first Afferent, because it trans- 
mits to, and the second Efferent, because it 
transmits from, the center some nervous 
vibration. One of the commonest examples 
of efferent excitation is when muscles con- 
tract in response to the efferent excitation 
of their motor nerves. A fair illustration of 
this mechanism can be found in ourselves in 
the act of winking. You can abolish the 
power to wink in one of three ways. You may 
do it, first, by cutting the branch of the fifth 
cranial nerve, which transmits sensation to 
the nerve center for winking at the top of the 
spinal cord. This center then does not know 
that any winking ought to be done, because 
it depends for all news of that kind on the 
sensory fifth nerve, and that has been cut. 
Or you may abolish winking by cutting the 
proper branch of the seventh pair of cranial 
138 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

nerves; then, no matter how the fifth nerve 
tells the center that it ought to wink hard, 
the center answers, '^ I cannot do it, because 
the seventh nerve, which is the efferent or 
motor nerve that works the muscles of the 
eyelids, is cut. " Or lastly, with both the fifth 
and seventh nerves intact, no winking will 
occur because the nerve center itself has been 
deadened by some narcotic poison. 

From that simple beginning of a real nerv- 
ous system, one can proceed, step by step, 
with animals still utterly brainless, but which 
have more developed and complicated nerv- 
ous systems ; and yet in them no other mode 
of working than by afferent, centric and effer- 
ent elements can be discovered. What one 
finds in these more organized nervous sys- 
tems is a greater number of these centers, 
each with its afferent and efferent nerves, 
but with one important addition, namely, that 
the separate nerve centers in them are con- 
nected by short nerve fibers, which are for 
the purpose of enabling the centers to work 
139 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

together, something as the jars of a Leyden 
battery are connected by short chains. 

A still further development shows a regu- 
lar chain of such nerve centers forming a 
distinctly ascending series, whose functions 
never change or abolish the original afferent 
and efferent mode of working, but instead 
show a more and more perfect harmony of 
action between the several parts. By this 
harmony of action new results in movement, 
or in the direction of movement, are secured, 
which would be impracticable were the sepa- 
rate centers to work independently. 

After a certain number of nerve centers 
have become associated, according to the 
scale of the animal's development, we find 
that the mutual co-operation of the centers 
begins to be plainly more frequent in certain 
directions than in others; that is, that it 
seems easier for the centers to act together 
to execute some movements than to execute 
other movements. When we examine why 
this is so, it proves to be because of the more 
140 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

frequent repetition of certain afferent stimuli 
than of the other afferent stimuli. Repeat 
one afferent excitation a hundred times and 
another only once, and the movements conse- 
quent on the first are clearly much more 
readily caused than those following on the 
unusual excitation. 

Therefore we have come now to the second 
and most important principle of all, in the 
organization of a nervous system, and which 
we have alluded to in the previous chapter, 
namely, Habit. The whole nervous system 
indeed in any animal, man included, is first 
organized by habit. However complex, for 
example, be the movements executed by mus- 
cles in order to produce a given effect, e. g., 
the movements of the eyeballs, some muscles 
contracting strongly, others most gently, 
others again relaxing just enough to allow 
their opponents to contract just so much and 
no more, — all these perfectly associated 
movements are nevertheless explicable only 
as the slowly acquired habits of the centers 
141 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

which supply those muscles with their motor 
nerves. Hence the important question, how 
did these centers come to acquire these 
habits? The answer is, from a thousand 
thousand times repeated afferent impres- 
sions along the optic, or sense of sight nerve, 
in habituating the efferent or motor nerves 
of the eye muscles to act together. 

Physiologists, therefore, when they speak 
of nerve centers being organized to perform 
such and such functions, mean, not that the 
nerve centers have been created so from the 
beginning, but that habit has so organized 
them. 

But the important principle to bear in mind 
here is that it is the afferent segment of the 
nervous system, or that which is acted upon 
by stimuli from the outside world, which is 
the ultimate source of this great fashioner of 
the nervous system. Habit, and not the nerve 
center itself, nor the efferent segment. This 
principle well nigh overshadows all others in 
its bearing upon the question of the origin 
142 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

and development of a nervous mechanism. 
We will gain no insight into the deeper prob- 
lems of nervous organization if we relax our 
hold on the continuous presence and opera- 
tion of afferent excitation all the way from 
the swaying arms of a Hydra Fusca up to the 
successive trains of thought in a human brain. 
We thus speak of it now, because further on 
we will have to refer repeatedly to the place 
of the Afferent in discussing some subjects, 
second to none in importance, about our own 
mental operations. Here, however, we start 
with the fact that it is the Afferent only 
which connects with the Environment. Upon 
the Afferent the nerve center wholly depends, 
not only for the primary source of its activ- 
ity, but for the organization of that activity 
so that it can ever become uniform. The re- 
action of a nerve center to an afferent stimu- 
lus has been likened to an explosion of energy 
set free by the lighted fuse of the Afferent. 
But that explosion would be an explosion and 
nothing more, but for that one great fact 
143 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

about the afferent nerve itself, namely, that 
it always causes the explosion to be in one 
direction only. Over and over again it does 
exactly the same thing as at first, and thus 
trains the nerve center to react only in one 
fashion. 

All this is due to the great law that an 
afferent nerve never varies in what it does. 
As Professor Sherrington expresses it, the 
afferent nerve,^ "extending from the recep- 
tive surface to the central nervous organ, 
forms the sole avenue which impulses gener- 
ated at its receptive point can use. It con- 
stitutes a private path exclusive to the 
impulses generated at its own receptive 
points^ and other receptive points than its 
own cannot receive it." The nerve centers, 
therefore, become accustomed to react in the 
same way to afferent stimuli, because these 
stimuli are never mixed or confused with 
others. 

^ Presidential Address, Section of Physiology, Brit. Assoc. 
Science, 1904. 

144 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

It is quite otherwise with either a single 
efferent nerve, or with any organized ner- 
vous path for efferent impulses, for these 
may be used in response to a great variety 
of afferent stimuli. Thus the act of coughing 
is executed by a whole group of motor nerves 
acting together in a regular way. But this 
same efferent path for coughing may be used 
by a number of very different afferent stim- 
uli starting from the nose, pharynx, lar5mx, 
bronchi, pleura, stomach, brain or other 
organs, so that not uncommonly it requires 
some search to find what the particular cause 
of the cough is. It may be a bean in a child's 
ear, or a worm in the intestine. An afferent 
stimulus, on the other hand, never breaks its 
rule of using none but its own path of excita- 
tion, and hence it is the source of sources of 
this great factor. Habit, in nervous evolution. 

Another peculiarity of afferent excitation, 
to which we shall have to allude again in the 
very highest connection, namely, in the suc- 
cession of ideas in human thinking, is that 
145 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

an afferent stimulus, though always itself 
single, once it excites an efferent act in a 
nerve center, may have that excitation 
spread from center to center, as it were, like 
so many successive efferent explosions. 
Thus a sneeze is always due to the excitation 
of a minute twig in the sensory or afferent 
nerve of the nostril, which then transmits it 
to an efferent center in the medulla oblon- 
gata at the top of the spinal cord. This effer- 
ent center then sends this excitation to fifty- 
five pairs of efferent centers to cause them 
to call their one hundred and ten muscles 
into one combined and well-regulated sneeze 
performance.^ 

^ A number of writers on nervous disorders seem to re- 
gard an attack of epilepsy as due to a spontaneous discharge 
of nervous energy in some cortical brain centers, the motor 
area being especially involved when the attack is accompa- 
nied by convulsions. As no other examples of spontaneous 
efferent actions can be cited, but on the contrary, such al- 
ways follow upon a preceding afferent stimulus, I would as- 
cribe the true beginning of an epileptic paroxysm, whatever 
its form, to an abnormal afferent excitation. This view of 
the nature of this serious nervous disease has an important 
bearing upon its treatment, as I explain in an article on the 
Pathology and Treatment of Epilepsy in the N. Y. Med. 
Journal, Nov. 8 and 15, 1902. 

146 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

All that we have said heretofore finds a 
complete illustration in the structure and 
functions of the spinal cord in all verte- 
brates. The spinal cord, which is the origi- 
nal nervous system in every vertebrate, as it 
is the first to appear in its embryonic devel- 
opment, consists of a great number of nerve 
centers, one above the other, all receiving 
their afferent and giving off their efferent 
nerves on each side, and as constantly joined 
together by tracts of communicating fibers, 
until finally the whole muscular system of the 
body is found to be under its exclusive con- 
trol. As remarked before, no primary law 
or function in the nervous system is ever 
superseded by any later developments; and 
so, however great be the additions afterwards 
of brain centers or functions, yet the spinal 
nerve centers retain all their original pre- 
rogatives, quite as much in man as in any of 
the rest of the animal world. If, as remarked 
above, you wish to show the cunning of your 
right hand in any work of skill, or the fluency 
147 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

of your speech with your tongue, your de- 
signing and talking brain has to ask the 
spinal nerve centers for the muscles of the 
hand and for those of the tongue to direct 
those muscles to do the work for it. 

Meanwhile this wonderfully organizing 
power of afferent habit works out results in 
creating special functions or modes of work- 
ing in the spinal cord which actually startle 
us with their close resemblance to what we 
are accustomed to regard as manifestations 
of design or purpose. Thus if a vigorous 
frog be suddenly decapitated with a sharp 
knife, and his headless body be put on a plate, 
it will forthwith jump up and assume on the 
plate a perfectly natural, if not somewhat 
impertinent attitude. If now a small drop 
of acetic acid is applied on the frog's side, 
as soon as it begins to irritate the skin, the 
headless frog gravely and deliberately raises 
his hind leg and brings up his foot to scratch 
off the acid. If more acid be applied, he 
brings down the arm to help scratch the same 
148 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

spot; and if the irritation continues, he be- 
gins to lose balance by trying to bring up the 
other leg also ; until at last, as if the itching 
had become intolerable, he makes a most 
natural dive for the floor. 

An amusing illustration of this kind once 
occurred to me in my college days, while fish- 
ing in a western stream with a classmate. My 
companion's luck had been poor, when at a 
deep, promising pool he became greatly ex- 
cited by a powerful bite, with a pull which 
bent his pole nearly double, only to find at 
last that he was drawing up a great mud 
turtle which had swallowed the hook beyond 
mistake. In vain my friend tried to per- 
suade the turtle when he landed him to put 
his head out from under his shell till he could 
get the hook free. Finally, as he had no 
other hook, my friend hung the turtle over 
a branch and sawed his head off with his 
jack-knife. Down at last dropped the tur- 
tle's headless body, when to our astonish- 
ment it straightway walked some two yards 
149 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

right into the water and dove off into the 
deep pool, just as if the creature kept an 
extra head under its shell to put on in an 
emergency ! 

In animals below the vertebrates, the nerv- 
ous system being composed of fewer series of 
centers, and all acting alike to their afferent 
stimuli, they proceed with such uniform and 
rigid habits of action that, like other ex- 
amples of unmitigated consistency, it occa- 
sionally leads to inconvenient results. While 
sojourning in Syria I was told that the whole 
country round Mt. Lebanon was dismayed 
one year by the news that a vast army of 
marching locusts was coming from the east- 
ern desert. The governor of the district 
ordered a regiment of soldiers to aid the peo- 
ple to construct a great rampart of heath 
bushes to be set on fire as the locusts came 
up to it, hoping thus to save the gardens 
of Beyrout. These locusts always hopped 
straight ahead, and on coming to a house 
went up its stone walls, over it and down it, 
150 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

as if it were a level place, and in such incon- 
ceivable numbers that an American resident 
described the noise of the great host passing 
over the roof as like to that of a tremendous 
hailstorm. At every green leaf on the way 
each took a bite, and then went on for the 
next one to take his bite, until in an incredi- 
bly short time not a green thing could be 
seen. When they reached the prepared 
heaps of heath and these were set on fire, 
the locusts marched on without pausing, until 
in a brief time they put the bonfires com- 
pletely out. As the sea was not far off every- 
body hoped that they would take to surf 
bathing. And so they did. Just as certain 
injurious political crowds among us can 
always be depended upon to march up to the 
polls and vote the straight ticket, when the 
vanguard reached the waves, like all good 
true locusts, in they hopped, followed by all 
the rest, till the billows seemed to roll only 
grasshoppers; nor did the scene end until 
the last of the rear guard, faithful to the 
151 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

great law of Afferent, Centric and Efferent, 
had skipped over the heaps of his dead com- 
rades to make his last jump into the blue 
waters of the Mediterranean. 

In structure the spinal cord has its centers 
located within, and like all ganglionic matter 
they are of a gray color. There is a special 
arrangement, however, of its cells according 
as they subserve an afferent or efferent func- 
tion, the afferent cells, of a more or less 
rounded shape, being grouped more toward 
the posterior segment of the cord where the 
afferent nerves enter, and the cells with 
efferent functions, usually larger and of a 
stellate shape, being grouped toward the an- 
terior segment whence the motor nerves 
emerge. At the top of the spinal cord, as 
it enters the skull, is developed the final 
supreme center of the entire system — the 
Medulla Oblongata — that fit and most re- 
sponsible ruler of the whole wonderful and 
beautifully regulated spinal mechanism, — 
that center in which a small injury would 
152 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

threaten life more than it would in the brain, 
as it may cause instant death, for the medulla 
holds the reins of the pulse and of the breath 
in its hands, while at the same time it acts 
as the intermediary between the various re- 
gions of the brain above and those of the 
spinal cord beneath. 

But the chief feature about this remarka- 
ble nervous apparatus, the spinal cord, is 
that however intricate its adjustments be, so 
that by it the most complicated and combined 
movements are executed, enough as we have 
seen to wear all the aspects of designed or 
purposive muscular acts, yet from first to 
last its operations are purely automatic. 
This is because its workings are all organized 
by the steady, unvarying operation of affer- 
ent stimulus. Without that there would be 
no centric change, and without centric change 
there would be no efferent impulse. Origi- 
nally nothing could be more haphazard than 
afferent stimuli, and thus at first the centric 
change would be correspondingly so; but 
153 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

when the same afferent stimulus recurs over 
and over again, the centric change becomes 
fixed by this repetition, and the efferent im- 
pulse follows suit, till a special mode of 
working, or, in other words, a special nerve 
function is established. A watch or a clock, 
therefore, could not be a more automatic 
mechanism than is a spinal nerve center. 

The desirability of distinctly recognizing 
the part taken by afferent habit in the organ- 
ization of nervous functions leads me, at the 
risk of being tedious, to cite another illustra- 
tion of the kind. The nervous mechanism of 
the act of breathing is a primary example of 
such organization. The afferent stimulus in 
the form of the sensation of the want of air, 
coming up by the afferent vagus nerve, leads 
to the successive efferent muscular move- 
ments of inspiration, and then of expiration, 
with all the regularity of the swing of a pen- 
dulum. Now let the habit of checking the re- 
turn swing of the pendulum during expira- 
tion be contracted, especially in childhood, 
154 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

the habit-forming age, by prolonged cough- 
ing, as in whooping cough or in measles, and 
there is danger of this bad habit in breathing 
lasting for years, or for life, in the form of 
the wretched disease, asthma. It should be 
noted that the act of coughing always occurs 
in expiration, thus interrupting the regular 
rhythm of expiration quickly following in- 
spiration. In asthma, the air enters easily 
in inspiration, but is checked in expiration, 
so that this latter, instead of being equal to 
inspiration, as in health, may in asthma be 
five times as long. Once the normal habits of 
breathing become deranged, the respiratory 
center may be at the mercy of a great variety 
of afferent stimuli, which are never perceived 
in health. Thus one form of asthma is called 
'^ cat asthma," because the mere entrance of 
a cat into the room will start the patient 
wheezing, though wholly ignorant that the 
animal is near. The son of a medical ac- 
quaintance of mine knew immediately by his 
breathing that some buckwheat was in the 
155 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

house, thongli he was in his own room on the 
top floor, and it was found that the cook had 
surreptitiously brought the forbidden article 
into the kitchen and was mixing it with water 
to make cakes for herself. I have had more 
than one patient who could sleep well in New 
York, but who would be sure to be awakened 
by an attack of asthma if they spent a night 
in Brooklyn across the East River. Other 
asthmatics have their attacks induced by the 
most trivial derangements of digestion, and 
but few of them can safely eat a hearty meal 
at night. Such whimsicalities of this com- 
plaint might be multiplied indefinitely, only 
to illustrate that there is always risk in in- 
terfering with old normal nervous habits. 
The constant coughing of chronic bronchitis 
will frequently induce its form of asthma in 
adults ; which, however, generally subsides if 
the bronchitis be cured. 

But it is in the medulla that we meet with 
special illustrations of a third great law 
of nervous development. To return for a 
156 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

moment to our first principle of discipline. 
That principle, whether applied in armies or 
in anything else, implies some source or 
sources of authoritative restraint, generally 
a regular hierarchy of commanders, one rank- 
ing the other. Nowhere in any instance is 
this great principle of discipline so impres- 
sively demonstrated as in the army, so to 
call them, of active centers in the nervous sys- 
tems of the higher animals. A constantly re- 
curring word in books on nervous physiology 
is '' Inhibition," as descriptive of the work- 
ings of certain nerves or nerve centers. 

One example will illustrate what this word 
refers to. By stimulating with an electric 
current one nerve which comes down from 
the medulla to the heart, you make the latter 
beat more powerfully and rapidly. By stimu- 
lating another nerve which also descends from 
the medulla to the heart, that organ at once 
begins to beat more slowly; stimulate that 
nerve still further and the heart beats very 
slowly ; still more again and it comes to a full 
157 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

stop. Now cut that same nerve and the heart 
bounds off to the most rapid, tumultuous 
beating. As an eminent physiologist char- 
acterizes it: This nerve bridles the heart, 
for when it is severed the heart behaves like 
a horse who throws its rider and straightway 
takes to racing. For this nerve is the in- 
hibitory or governing nerve of the heart, that 
nerve which makes the heart a strong heart 
by governing it. If you suddenly tell a man 
a dreadful piece of news, and his pulse 
scarcely quickens or quivers, is he a weak 
man or has he a weak heart! Another man 
sees a street boy preparing to snowball him, 
and at once his pulse runs up to 120. What 
is the difference between these two men? 
The difference lies in the cardiac branches 
of their vagi nerves. 

Now as we investigate the functions of 
this great law of inhibition in the nervous 
system, we find that as higher centers are de- 
veloped in the series, their influence is shown 
not only in new powers or functions super- 
158 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

added to the older ones, but that they con- 
stantly inhibit, or, in other words, control 
the action of the lower centers. Thus in the 
frog a mass of centers called the optic lobes 
are developed just above the medulla. Now 
as long as these lobes are connected with the 
spinal cord, you may stimulate the afferent 
spinal nerves of the frog, and but little or 
no reflex movement will result. Cut, how- 
ever, the connecting tract, and thus free the 
cord from the control of these higher centers, 
and the slightest tickling of the skin will 
then make the frog kick actively. 

After we pass the medulla oblongata, we 
find ourselves proceeding along large tracts 
of nerve fibers which soon present us with 
a series of considerable swellings along their 
course, and which are found to be altogether 
new or differently constructed masses of gray 
matter, or ganglia as they are called. These 
new ganglia prove to be chiefly portentous 
developments of the afferent system, caus- 
ing in fact the afferent segment to take the 
159 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

lead in nervous life, for they are no less than 
the centers of the special senses of sight, 
smell and hearing, larger or smaller accord- 
ing to the needs of the animal for each sense 
respectively. 

Now when we use the term special senses, 
we mean a form of sensation. But what is 
sensation itself! Nobody knows. All defini- 
tions of sensation amount to saying that sen- 
sation is sensation, for to call it an act of the 
consciousness is, when translated into Anglo- 
Saxon, to announce that the thing which 
feels, feels. This Something called Con- 
sciousness makes its first appearance in ver- 
tebrates after the whole mechanism of the 
spinal cord and medulla has been completed, 
and the lower vertebrates seem to need but 
little else for their world than these special 
sense ganglia, which are proportionately de- 
veloped in them according to their life habits. 
However even in them two other swellings 
appear, which are relatively wonderfully 
small in many of these animals considering 
160 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

their great import, as they are no less than 
the beginnings of the cerebral hemispheres, 
or what we call the brain in ourselves. 

The accompanying figures tell the story of 
their evolution. In Figure 1 we have the 



Ol 



Fig. 1 — ^The Brain of a Lamprey. 

sensory ganglia and the brain of a lamprey, 
a small fish often mistaken for an eel from 
his form. Those rounded masses 01, repre- 
sent his olfactory lobes, for his habits re- 
quire him to be good at smelling. Then the 
161 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

two large swellings below are his optic lobes, 
while those two insignificant spheres be- 
tween, marked C, are his cerebral lobes or 




Fig. 2 — Brain of a Carp. 

brains, or all that he has to cogitate with. 
Fig. 2 shows the sensory and intellectual ap- 
paratus of a carp. He does not smell at all, 
so he has no olfactory lobes, but his optic 
lobes are large compared with his brain or 
mental equipment. Fig. 3 represents the ap- 
paratus of that old friend of the physiolo- 
162 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

gist, the poor frog, in which his mechanism 
for thinking, though larger than that of 
fishes, is scarcely larger than his optic lobes. 




Fig. 3 — Brain of a Frog. 

M, in each of these figures represents the 
medulla. 

In some fishes, such as the carp, when the 
ganglia which correspond to the cerebral 
hemispheres are experimentally removed, 
they do not seem to mind it at all, for even 
then there is little, if anything, to distinguish 
163 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

them from perfectly normal animals. They 
maintain their natural attitude, and use their 
tails and fins in swimming with the same 
vigor and precision as before. They not only 
see but are able to find their food. If worms 
are thrown into the water where they are 
swimming, they immediately pounce upon 
them. If a piece of string similar in size to 
a worm is thrown in, they are able to detect 
the ditference, and they drop it after having 
seized it. They even, to some extent, dis- 
tinguish colors, for when some red and some 
white wafers are thrown into the water, the 
fish almost invariably select the red in pref- 
erence to the white. 

It is much the same with the frog. If care 
be taken to keep the frogs alive after the re- 
moval of their cerebral lobes until they have 
quite recovered from the injury, brainless 
frogs will behave just like full-brained frogs 
under like circumstances. They will crawl 
under stones, or bury themselves in the earth 
at the beginning of winter, and after the 
164 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

period of hibernation is over, they will come 
out and diligently catch the flies which are 
buzzing about in the vessels in which they 
are kept. 
But Fig. 4, which shows the brain of a 



c 




Fig. 4 — Brain of a Pigeon. 

pigeon, illustrates how much higher in the 
scale birds are than fishes and amphibia. 
The original basal ganglia which we have 
been considering, are beginning now to be 
completely overshadowed by the cerebral 
165 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

lobes, and hence after their removal, birds 
show much greater alterations in their be- 
havior. Memory and volition seem annihi- 
lated, and the birds do not seek their food. 
But if the optic lobes are uninjured, the bird 
will walk round the room, avoiding obstacles ; 
it will fly from one place and alight securely 
on another, always preferring a perch to the 
floor; and if placed on a swinging cord, it 
balances itself perfectly with the to and fro 
movements. If placed in a special attitude, 
it ruffles its feathers and shows fight, thus 
illustrating that pugnacity antedates brains, 
or, as physiologists express it, belongs to a 
lower level. 

In the ascent from birds to mammals, the 
development of the cerebral ganglia or lobes 
grows from mere bulbous swellings into 
great masses which cover more and more the 
sensory ganglia, until in the monkey these 
are wholly buried under their mass. In man 
these original centers at the base of the skull 
are relatively so insignificant, that we are 
166 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

accustomed to leave them out of considera- 
tion, and to speak of his cerebral hemi- 
spheres a» his brain. 

As regards the functions of the brain and 
their relations, the first conclusion we come 
to is that an unmistakable promotion, so to 
speak, has occurred in the mammalian brain 
of the great functions of sensation, conscious- 
ness and the power of directing movement, 
from the basal ganglia of fishes, amphibia 
and birds up to the great cerebral ganglia 
above. Eemove these from a mammal, and 
it is then far from acting as if it still had the 
same degree of consciousness or power of 
movement left which those lower in the scale 
possess. 

This does not prove that the cerebral gan- 
glia have entirely superseded the original 
basal ganglia, for facts of disease at the base 
of the brain in man show that even in him, 
these original nerve centers still hold much 
of their old relations. The case instead is 
like the history of a prosperous firm which 
167 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

began business in a very small way and in 
humble quarters, and then when it had 
branched out to an undreamed of extent 
from its lowly start, the highly trained heads 
of the company are found to have moved up 
to large and commodious apartments on the 
upper floors, while the original routine work 
is yet done, as of old, in the stories below. 
Simple, routine work is quite enough now for 
the basal ganglia, while consciousness is 
needed to go up higher where the far wider 
operations of mind have to be carried on. 
Nevertheless it is the same old firm, for we 
will find that its principles and modes of 
doing business by the heads of the establish- 
ment have not changed, though they are now 
handling millions where they used only to 
deal with a few dollars. 

We may not unnaturally think that in our- 
selves, the far range of our memories, imagi- 
nations, feelings and ideas must have a very 
different genesis and be according to very 
different laws from the simple unconscious 
168 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

functions of the first example of a nervous 
sj^stem which we have described. But a little 
attention to the source and sequence of our 
ideas, even when taking their widest sweep, 
will show a quite unmistakable correspond- 
ence to the old original methods of nervous 
work. 

Thus even with that unique mental faculty 
of speech, which we have been considering at 
length, we are met at the outset with our 
old familiar terms Afferent and Efferent, as 
plainly as in any function of the spinal cord. 
Our speech consists of words which come to 
us through the afferent channels of the ear 
and of the eye, and of words which go from 
us by the efferent Broca convolution. More- 
over, in the order of time, the afferent pre- 
ceded and created the efferent, for the child 
first heard the words addressed to its ear, 
and then slowly taught Broca 's convolution 
to respond; slowly, for it evidently under- 
stands words some time before it can learn to 
stammer them on its tongue. 
169 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

But likewise many of the longest and most 
intricate workings of our minds in acts of 
thinking, can often be traced to a single 
afferent excitation which was the origin of 
the whole process. One familiar illustration 
will suffice. While you are in your reclining 
chair, perhaps with your eyes shut, some 
friend casually plays on the piano in the ad- 
joining room an old well-known tune, which 
you were fond of in your father 's house years 
gone by. A throng of memories of long ago, 
of faces not seen for years, of some that will 
never be seen here again, pictures of places 
and scenes, with their events and experi- 
ences, all crowd upon you till you are star- 
tled by tears welling up in your eyes. You 
spring up at finding yourself so deeply 
moved by — what? By that single afferent 
impression coming through the auditory 
nerve ! 

In fact any analysis of our ordinary men- 
tal processes, made by retracing step by 
step how one idea has been suggested by a 
170 



NERVOUS SYSTEM EVOLUTION 

previous idea, and that in turn by another, 
will usually bring us at last to some one 
afferent excitation coming to us from our 
outside world. That is just the old way in 
which the Afferent works, as we showed, on 
page 146, how in the spinal mechanism it exe- 
cutes a sneeze. We need not be metaphysi- 
cians to make this discovery, that our think- 
ing so often begins first with some sensation 
then experienced. Nor does it take long to 
find that many of our trains of thought, as 
they are well termed, are somehow habitual 
to us, as if we have fallen into the way of 
thinking thus. In other words, our old 
friend. Habit, whom we have seen to be such 
a multiform organizer of spinal ganglia and 
spinal functions, seems to have organized 
our brains also! He has thousands of pri- 
vate afferent wires with which to reach our 
consciousness from every part of our bodies, 
each one of which can start a sensation, and 
that an idea, until it seems difficult to deny 
that our thoughts are but the products of 
171 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

this great afferent creator of nervous opera- 
tions. 

Some may infer from these considerations 
that we have come to the end, that is, that 
we need not go further in explaining the 
'' how " of our thinking selves. Many, in- 
deed, have thought so, and have maintained 
that we men and women are mentally the re- 
sults of our environment, that is, of our out- 
side world creating us by its afferent excita- 
tions. The nervous system of a polyp is cer- 
tainly a pure mechanism, a most mechanical 
affair, but the principles of its mechanism 
continue just the same through every step 
in the long series of Evolution, till at last 
we find those virtually mechanical principles 
accounting for — Man! 

But in our next chapter we will find our- 
selves face to face with an entirely new fash- 
ioner of nervous matter, one to whom brain 
protoplasm is as clay to the potter. 



172 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BRAIN AKD PEESONALITY 

In the preceding chapter we have seen that 
the evolution of a nervous system is guided 
by a great principle, which on the last analy- 
sis may be regarded as a specific nervous re- 
action to environment. By means of the un- 
deviating inflow along the afferent channels 
of stimuli from the outer world or environ- 
ment, the receptive nerve elements are 
affected till they in turn excite an outflow 
along the efferent channel; and when the 
same afferent stimulus is repeated often 
enough, the consequent efferent effect be- 
comes so uniform as to constitute a special 
mode of nervous action, or, in other words, 
a nervous function. It is thus that this affer- 
ent agency coming from without continu- 
ously proceeds, fashioning one system of 
173 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

nervous centers after another, until at last 
it begins to look as if out of the human brain 
itself, it constructs what is virtually a pure 
thinking machine like all its previous mechan- 
isms, and whose operations, though more 
complex, yet illustrate the same automatic 
principles which govern the functions of the 
medulla oblongata. This inference seems 
legitimate, because in so many of its activi- 
ties the human brain appears fully to exem- 
plify just the same order of reactions which 
we have met before at lower levels. 

Why is this not enough? It is in no sense 
enough, simply because the brain of man and 
the mind of man do not correspond. There 
is a gap here which no facts of animal evolu- 
tion account for. Man's brain in physical 
and anatomical respects corresponds quite 
closely to that of the chimpanzee, and hence, 
according to all precedents, his mind should 
show but little advance in degree, and none 
in kind, over the mind of this ape. We can- 
not allow at this point any confusion in 
174 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

reasoning to obscure this fundamental fact. 
On the one side is Homo, properly placed in 
zoology among the Primates, because in his 
body as in his brain he clearly belongs to that 
class of animals. 

But it is thus as to his mind. Those stu- 
pendous works, the bridge across the Firth 
of Forth and the Simplon tunnel through the 
Alps, existed down to the smallest detail in 
their engineers ' minds before they existed on 
earth. It is by his mind that a man is en- 
abled with a glass prism to calculate to a 
mile the distance between two fixed stars, 
which not the greatest telescope can show as 
other than one star. By his mind another 
draws the map of a country as it was in the 
Silurian period. By his mind a third is ex- 
cited to enthusiasm over the^ interesting 
deduction of the equations for the infinitesi- 
mal motion of a rigid body from the invari- 
ance of the expression dx^ + dy^ + d22. So 
such illustrations, multiplied to infinity, of 

^ Prof. Sylvester; Works, vol. i., p 34. 

175 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

human mental activity in science, philosophy, 
religion, poetry, art, statesmanship, finance 
and the rest, lead to the single conclusion that 
while the gap between the brain of an anthro- 
poid ape and the brain of man is too insignifi- 
/ cant to count, their difference as beings corre- 
sponds to the distance of the earth from the 
nearest fixed star. 

Therefore the brain of man does not ac- 
count for Man. What does? We are bound 
by our premises to seek for an answer to this 
question only by searching the brain itself, 
to note whether in it there are evidences of 
the presence of something whose agency 
affords the sole explanation why the human 
brain differs so in its capacities from any 
, other animal brain. That something, which 
would account for everything, is, we claim, 
the Ego or the Human Personality. 

This statement of ours brings us to the 
great issue which sharply draws the lines be- 
tween the partisans of two opposing doc- 
trines. On the one side the contention is that 
176 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

there is no such thing as personality apart 
from the brain. The organization of cere- 
bral matter accounts for everything mental 
and moral in man. The conception of the 
human personality as an entity independent 
of, or separate from the material organ of 
the mind they pronounce to be as unreal 
as the conception of " vital spirits " of for- 
mer times. To speak of the soul is pure mys- 
ticism and should be rejected as unscientific. 
Our consciousness instead represents only a 
passing phase of our cerebral activities, and 
the Ego in us is nothing more than the func- 
tional result of the arrangement for the time 
being of the molecules or ions of our brain 
matter. 

On the other side, personality is affirmed 
to be the most certain reality of the universe. 
All other phenomena are contingent upon, 
and relative to personal consciousness. As to 
the Ego, the statements of the other side are 
to be rejected because they are purely meta- 
physical assumptions which are wholly con- 
177 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tradicted by the physical and material facts 
which show that brain matter has itself no 
properties of mind, and becomes related to 
mental processes only in certain localities by 
becoming there artificially, and not origi- 
nally nor congenitally endowed with such 
functions. It is not with his whole brain that 
a man knows, thinks or devises, but he does 
so in limited areas of one hemisphere thereof, 
which he himself has educated for the pur- 
pose. The question then follows, how came 
these brain places to be thus chosen and not 
others precisely like them in original organ- 
ization 1 That this great creative choice pro- 
\/ ceeds from no source in the brain itself is 
demonstrated by the following considera- 
tions. 

Thus, as we have already shown, the 
speech centers in the brain are as much the 
creations of the individual himself to store 
the words in them for clothing his thoughts 
withal as if he made a wardrobe in which to 
store garments for clothing his body. The 
178 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

speech centers no more generate the words 
in the one case th^n the wardrobe manufac- 
tures the articles which it contains. Hence 
men supply themselves with as many differ- 
ent languages as they invent different cos- 
tumes, though no one ever started in life with 
either of these equipments. In fact he might 
inherit clothes but never words, for word 
centers in the brain must always be person- 
ally made, because no brain of itself ever 
made a word. 

As we stated in Chapter VI, this is proved 
beyond mistake by the human faculty of 
learning to read, which rules out the error of 
some theorists, who, confining themselves to 
observing how little children first learn 
speech through the ear, ascribe the faculty 
to automatic imitation. But a reading cen- 
ter in the angular gyrus has nothing to do 
with the ear, and moreover it can be made 
only at the age when purposive prolonged 
intention takes the place of echo-like imita- 
tion. 

179 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

But we are now about to enumerate a most 
important series of facts, which like those 
previously mentioned, came to light by medi- 
cal experience, and which go even further 
than the discovery of the speech centers in 
demonstrating how the brain is physically 
related to thought. We begin as before 
with an actual occurrence — this time in sur- 
gery. 
Sir William MacEwen, the eminent Pro- 
/ fessor of Surgery of the University of Glas- 
gow, gives the particulars of the case of a 
mechanic who received a severe injury to his 
head.^ Immediately after the accident he 
was in a peculiar mental condition. Physi- 
cally he could see, but what he saw conveyed 
no impression to his mind. Thus an object 
presented itself before him which he could 
not make out, but when this object emitted 
sounds of the human voice, he at once recog- 
nized it to be a man who was one of his 

* Sir William MacEwen ; Address before the British Medi- 
cal Association on the Surgery of the Brain and Spinal Cord, 
Brit. Med. Jour., 1888, vol. ii., p. 307. 

180 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

fellow-workers. He was equally unable to 
recognize his wife and children. By eye- 
sight he could not tell how many fingers he 
held up when he placed his own hand before 
his face till he became cognizant of the num- 
ber by the sense of touch. These symptoms 
gave the key to the hidden lesion in his brain 
and therefore where to trephine his skull. 
On operation it was found that a portion of 
the inner table of the skull had been detached 
from the outer and had become imbedded in 
the gray matter of that locality. The bone 
was removed from the brain and reimplanted 
in proper position, upon which he recovered 
and returned to his work. 

It is evident from this that that fragment 
of bone interfered with an important mental 
function located in just that brain spot which 
it penetrated, because so soon as it was re- 
moved from that place the mental function 
returned. What was that mental function? 
It was not sight, for the man saw his wife 
and friends as well as before, but he did not 
181 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

knoiv what he saw. Hence, seeing and know- 
ing what is seen are not the same thing, be- 
cause each of these mental processes has its 
separate seat in the brain. But as knowing 
appears to be so much higher as an intellec- 
tual performance than the simple sensation 
of sight, writers have inaccurately termed 
this special form of abolition of intelligence 
mind-blindness, to distinguish it from word- 
blindness, which follows upon damage to the 
word center in the angular gyrus. But word- 
blindness which renders a person wholly 
illiterate, because he no longer recognizes 
printed or written words when he sees them, 
though he knew them perfectly before, is as 
much an example of mind-blindness as was 
this patient's mind-blindness, the only dif- 
ference between the two being in the things 
which were seen. In word-blindness words 
are seen but not known ; in this so-called mind- 
blindness objects are seen but not known. In 
both, therefore, the blindness is the same in 
nature, namely, mental blindness. 
182 




O 
o o 

m 

Q 
H H 
W O 

< 



^5 



w 

Oh 

m 



o 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

As this inability to recognize visual objects 
has been frequently observed after localized 
damage to the brain from disease, the local- 
ity itself where things perceived by sight 
are then known has become as well identi- 
fied as is the word center in the angular 
gyrus, with the same important deductions 
about the way by which this mental function 
comes to be so localized as in the case of the 
eye word center. That is to say, we learn to 
know how we know what it is we see by first 
discovering where this act of knowing is done, 
and secondly, by establishing the fact that 
no other place in the whole brain save this 
knows anything by sight, and also why this 
is so. 

In explanation we shall first state that the 
primary center of sight in the occipital lobe 
is in the neighborhood of a wedge-shaped 
convolution called the cuneus. (See Plate 
I.) This convolution, of course, is found 
equally in both hemispheres, and that it is 
directly related to sight is proved by the fact 
183 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

that it is only when the region of this convo- 
lution is destroyed in both hemispheres that 
total blindness is produced. That function 
of sight in the cuneus is doubtless congenital, 
but the child when born does not know what 
it sees. That particular power is afterwards 
acquired, not by the cuneus, but by an adja- 
cent area of brain cells, in front of the cuneus, 
which we ourselves for the purpose of con- 
venience will hereafter call the precuneus.^ 
How this locality conies to acquire this im- 
portant mind function of knowing what vis- 
ual objects are, we will discuss after those 
equally interesting and still more varied 
facts connected with the recognition of 
sounds. 

Thus in the temporal lobe is found the 
original center of hearing, just as the cuneus 
in the occipital lobe is the original center of 
sight. But a whole group of centers becomes 
developed afterwards around the original 

'Some writers attach this term to a different portion of 
the sight object area. 

184 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

auditory center, each one of which has 
learned what different kinds of sound mean. 
One of the greatest of these is that for music, 
and a divine faculty it is, because more than 
anything else it is the speech of the soul as 
it awakens to a communion with the great 
harmonies of the non-material universe. A 
true musician must have a richly furnished 
shrine for the goddess of Music in his tem- 
poral lobe, and that he has is proved by some 
persons, who, after having been very fond of 
music, and able to tell at once whether they 
were listening to a composition by Mendel- 
ssohn, or one by Wagner, suddenly experi- 
ence the sad misfortune technically termed 
amusia. No longer can they recognize any 
tune, however familiar, and in vain they 
try a violin or piano to bring back to them 
their departed joy. They know no music 
thereafter, the reason being that material 
damage has happened to the center in the 
temporal lobe which has been separately edu- 
cated for music, just as another place in the 
185 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

same lobe has been separately educated for 
words. 

We have already described what is meant 
by word-deafness, as well as how it is caused. 
But besides the center for words and the cen- 
ter for music, the auditory area of the tem- 
poral lobe has a place where the meaning of 
sounds in general is recognized, as the visual 
area just mentioned has its place for recog- 
nizing objects of sight. Let this auditory 
area be separately damaged, and the unfor- 
tunate then cannot tell the sound of a loco- 
motive whistle from that of a church bell. 
All sounds, including the voices of his 
friends, are alike indistinguishable noises to 
him. To this condition the term mind-deaf- 
ness has been given, signifying sound-mean- 
ing deafness. 

Therefore while the ability to know is a 
great attribute of the human mind, yet these 
facts prove that there are actual physical 
bases in the brain on whose integrity as such 
this faculty can alone be exercised. An 
186 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

artist may be lost in admiration while gazing 
at the Sistine Madonna. An apoplectic clot 
may make him the next day, though still able 
to see that great picture, no longer able to 
distinguish it from a wall paper. A trained 
musician may be entranced at one time 
listening to a symphony of Beethoven, but 
in a few hours, though still able to hear it, he 
may be wholly unable to recognize it as music. 
In both cases a highly developed mental 
capacity is lost immediately after a local 
brain injury. How are we to explain this 
sudden abolition of superior mental endow- 
ments by such physical changes? 

The explanation is as conclusive as it is 
important, namely, that these knowing areas 
are found in the same brain hemisphere that 
contains the speech centers, and in that hem- 
isphere only, so that the inference is certain 
that they are all created by the same agency. 
Thus Professor MacEwen's patient was a 
right-handed man, and the splinter was 
driven into a convolution of his left brain, 
187 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

that is, into the speaking and not into the 
wordless hemisphere. Now, he had just the 
same collection of cells in the corresponding 
region in front of the right cnneus, and more- 
over they were not injured at all in the ac- 
cident; nevertheless they could not help him 
recognize his wife and children any more 
than those cells could read Latin ! It is evi- 
dent, therefore, that those right hemisphere 
cells, though they could see, because they be- 
longed to the visual area, yet did not know 
what they saw, any more than an infant 
knows what it sees when it first comes into 
the world. Though existing in an adult man 
they had never been taught the meaning of 
visual objects, any more than his right tem- 
poral lobe cells had ever been taught to hear 
a word, or his right angular gyrus to read a 
word. 

Likewise it has been found that the in- 
juries, technically termed lesions, which pro- 
duce the various forms of mind-deafness 
above described, occur only in the left hemi- 
188 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

spheres of right-handed persons, or in the 
right hemispheres of left-handed persons; 
in other words, they show how these mental 
functions strictly follow the hand most used 
in childhood, just as the speech centers do. 

Hence we learn to know just as we learn 
to think. We think in words, and for that 
purpose we register our word memories in 
their laboriously prepared brain places. So 
also we register the memories of what we see 
and of what we hear in their prepared places, 
the preparation in both instances having 
originally been begun by the most active hand 
in response to personal intent. Investiga- 
tions into infant psychology show that the 
first training of the sight object center oc- 
curs only a little earlier than the time when 
the cells in the temporal lobe are being 
trained to hear the first words, for the in- 
fant begins its lessons of sight interpreta- 
tion by stretching forth its little hand to find 
out what it is which it is looking at. So far 
back in our lives, however, did this process 
189 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

begin that we have forgotten all about it ; but 
the saying, "a burnt child dreads the fire," 
refers to the inscription made by the child 
on its precuneus that a flame is not like some 
other attractively shining thing, and that it 
had better not try again to seize hold of it. 

According to the physiological laws which 
we have already mentioned, memories of all 
kinds are doubtless registered in our brain 
' eells by the original stimulus of each, and 
when an agency like conscious purpose sys- 
tematically repeats the same stimulus to the 
same cells, they become arranged there in a 
library of records, as we have shown is the 
case in the speech centers. There is really 
nothing incomprehensible in this, for some- 
thing quite analogous to it all is accom- 
plished in that remarkable mechanism, the 
phonograph, . in which layer after layer of 
its delicate receptive wax leaves ma}^ be 
found covered with all kinds of sentences, or 
entire songs with their tunes ; while by a de- 
vice similar to Broca's convolution, there 
190 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

come back again through its brazen throat 
the words, tnnes, tones, and all else spoken 
into the machine. An uninstructed Moslem 
sheikh from Arabia might regard this as an 
unholy invention of Satan, which of itself 
produces all that it utters, whereas neither 
it nor Satan but a human person is the source 
of every one of its uncanny performances. 

From these considerations there can be no 
doubt that the exercise of every separate 
mental faculty is conditioned by acquired 
cerebral changes similar to those by which 
is interpreted all information coming by the 
eye and the ear. The brain thus comes to 
have places where memories are stored for 
the understanding of each special sensation. 
But it also follows on anatomical grounds 
that the human being when he thinks, per- 
ceives, knows, remembers, conceives, reasons, 
purposes and speaks has these powers physi- 
cally located in only one of the two hemi- 
spheres of his brain. As long as the educated 
hemisphere is in sound condition it matters 
191 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

little, as far as the mind is concerned, what 
happens to the uneducated hemisphere. 
Thus the man mentioned in Chapter IV, p. 
63, who had lost one of his hemispheres by 
disease, happily for him had his speaking 
hemisphere left intact, and therefore he re- 
mained himself in all mental and moral char- 
acteristics. Hence his story and others like 
his in medical literature prove that human 
brain matter does not become human in its 
powers until the personality within takes it 
in hand to fashion it. But for that purpose 
one hemisphere of the brain matter is quite 
enough, just as one violin is quite enough 
for its player, while to the untaught hemi- 
sphere is left only what it had at birth, with- 
out a word or an idea or a single acquired 
accomplishment. 

This statement, which implies that one of 
the two human brain hemispheres is nor- 
mally unintelligent and thoughtless, is un- 
acceptable to some reasoners because it com- 
pels the admission that the thinker and his 
192 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

brain are two separate things, the brain, like 
the hand, being only the instrument of the 
thinker. Therefore they search for indica- 
tions that the silent hemisphere sometimes 
does come to the help of its highly endowed 
partner when the latter is disabled in its 
speaking power by disease — the inference 
being that it does so by its inherent capacity 
for speech. But no unmistakable cases of 
the kind have yet been published, and, as we 
have remarked before in Chapter VI, those 
which seem to be so, can easily be otherwise 
explained. Thus in childhood both hemi- 
spheres are equally teachable, and speech lost 
by damage to one can soon be made up by the 
education of the speech convolutions in the 
other. But the age when new languages may 
be learned varies in different individuals, so 
that it is not impossible for it to be done in 
the fifties. If, therefore, an adult is found 
to have recovered from aphasia after a time, 
this does not prove that he had two speech 
centers all the while, for speech is never 
193 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

an origmal endowment nor a spontaneous 
power, but must always be the result of the 
special training of brain cells. That this 
marvelous training is practically limited to 
only one hemisphere is shown by the positive 
and not hypothetical evidence in hundreds 
of cases of individuals, many of them men 
distinguished for mental gifts, who after a 
stroke causing either sensory or motor 
aphasia, never regained their lost powers, 
however long they lived afterwards with an 
uninjured hemisphere in their heads. 

Nor is the problem changed or lessened by 
referring to the speaking and knowing hemi- 
sphere as somehow the " driving " hemi- 
sphere, for the question then is what makes 
it '' drive " so wondrously to the utmost 
ranges of human thought, while its fellow is 
left unable to know a life companion by sight 
or to distinguish strains of music from mere 
noises. 

Meanwhile before the advent of this per- 
sonal agency which deals so remarkably with 
194 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

portions of human brain matter as to impart 
to them transcendent properties which they 
did not have before, nor ever could have spon- 
taneously, the only organizer of nervous tis- 
sue which we have met was the Afferent, 
bringing stimuli from the environment or 
outside world. But the more we study the 
l^rocesses which result in these mind-linked 
changes in Man with the same attention 
which has been bestowed upon the operations 
of the Afferent, the plainer it becomes that 
their formative stimuli come not from with- 
out but from within, and are essentially un- 
like the workings of the Afferent. Nothing 
savoring of purpose or design enters into the 
play of the Afferent as it flows into the nerve s/ 
centers with its sensations, any more than 
the currents of air causing the threads of 
an ^olian harp to vibrate have any musical 
meaning comparable to the " airs " of a 
Verdi. Instead of that the centers organized 
by the Afferent for work perform that work 
with no more design than does a watch pur- 
195 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

posely go when it is wound up. Automatism, 
pure and simple, is inseparable from the 
Afferent in every one of its relations. More- 
over this afferent mechanism is congenital, 
entering the world ready-made, without 
needing mind to work it. 

But to speak of a personality which thinks, 
purposes and wills as automatic, is a self-con- 
tradiction in terms. We need not appeal to 
metaphysics for our argument, because we 
now meet with another strong line of evi- 
dence that the personality can dispense with 
the most important means of afferent 
stimuli which Nature furnishes, and yet 
make good their loss because the personality 
is independent and self-determining, and 
hence can triumph over the most serious dep- 
rivations possible of its afferent mechan- 
isms for communication with the world in 
which it lives. This has been shown in some 
members of our race who have suffered from 
certain great misfortunes in early life, which, 
however, constitute in a way most instruc- 
196 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tive physiological experiments. To appre- 
ciate the force of these demonstrations we 
must first take into account how much in each 
case was lost of life's equipment for mental 
development. Thus it requires some effort 
to estimate how much education the human 
mind receives from the single atferent chan- 
nel of the eye. To do this at all adequately, 
we must go back to the first news which the 
child gets from the outer world by sight. A 
series of impressions, first of color, then of 
form, then of distance, and lastly of defi- 
nite objects, are made upon the brain vis- 
ual area, until by repetition a vast store 
of picture memories are there laid up for 
life, as so many object lessons. How much, 
therefore, is the mind of a young child de- 
prived of, if it becomes blind before this 
great afferent teacher could give it a single 
lesson ! 

But for the education and direction of 
thought and feeling the human being, differ- 
ent from the lower animals, gains more by 
197 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the afferent channel of the Ear than by that 
of the Eye. The only exception to this law 
seems to be in the case of birds. Mr. Sclater 
sealed np the ears of newly hatched chicks, 
and not one of them conld be induced to come 
to the mother hen who was excitedly clucking 
to them. The chicks were then placed where 
they could not see her, and their ears were 
unstopped, when as quickly as they heard 
her they ran round to where she was and 
were soon under her wings. But for the 
human infant the loss of hearing is a terri- 
ble calamity. Besides being at first its only 
appeal to others, it is itself a relief to the 
child to cry. Hence, when it cannot hear its 
own cry, it becomes the more disturbed by 
its feelings, because loving looks and touch 
only imperfectly make up for kindly voice, 
tones and ivords. We must not forget that 
to a human ear, however young, words soon 
have some meaning, more than parents may 
then suppose, until a few months afterwards 
they are surprised that their children know 
198 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

so much. If words once begin to reach 
through the ear, the mind springs forward 
to its limitless inheritance of thought, and 
especially of feelings. It is the ear, not the 
eye, which moves the heart. We see with in- 
difference a fish in its dying writhings, but 
we cannot listen to cries of pain without 
emotion. The seeing of the eye supplies the 
intellect with more ideas than do sounds (not 
words) which come through the ear. But 
the intellect informing eye makes more mis- 
takes than all the afferent channels put to- 
gether in the information which it brings. 
Its news has always to be revised and cor- 
rected by the other senses before it can be 
accepted. Thus it reports that a man is only 
a foot high when he is a mile off. But the 
ear is always accurate. I have recognized 
a friend's voice when it came over four hun- 
dred miles on a telephone wire as plainly as 
if he had been in the next room. Close the 
ear, therefore, of a child, and it remains 
more a mere animal than when any other 
199 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

avenue with the outer world is closed, be- 
cause it is dumb. 

If we should liken our apparatus for mind- 
training to a boat which is to take us over the 
sea of life, the great afferent mechanisms of 
the eye and of the ear might then be regarded 
as corresponding to the hull and to the frame 
respectively. Can the personality, therefore, 
survive the complete wreck of both, and go on 
with nothing but the keel to cling to for the 
rest of the voyage? The answer would cer- 
tainly be no, if the personality depended, not 
only for its development, but also for its own 
origin, upon its afferent mechanisms. If, on 
the other hand, the Afferent has nothing to 
do with the personality except to inform it, 
the loss of the Afferent will have no other 
effect on the personality than that of leaving 
it in ignorance. The personality would then 
be simply like one condemned to solitary con- 
finement. That being so, if only some mes- 
sages could reach him by any route, how- 
ever unusual or roundabout, the personality 
200 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY' 

would be found as complete and individual 
as ever. 

The conclusiveness of this demonstration 
needs a trained physiologist to appreciate it 
fully, because he well knows how much each 
special sense contributes to the mental equip- 
ment of a human being, and, therefore, how 
much is lost when not one, but two, of the 
chiefest life instructors of the mind are 
simultaneously lost. It is this which makes 
the autobiography of the celebrated Helen 
Keller of such intense interest, regarded 
purely from a physiological point of view.^ 
So important and decisive in their bearing 
upon the subject of our discussion are the 
facts illustrated by her story, that we feel 
justified in dwelling upon them at some 
length. It is not on account of her becoming 
such an accomplished woman, with so many 
eminent men and women among her personal 
friends and correspondents, that we do so, 

1 The story of My Life, by Helen Keller. 1903. Double- 
day, Page & Co. 

201 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

but because to a pliysiologist she is such an 
instructive " case." Physicians get into the 
way of looking at patients as so many 
*' cases " of tliis or that disease, and so 
Helen Keller fixes the attention of a physiolo- 
gist not from sympathy, for he has nothing 
to do with sympathy, but because she is 
a first-class scientific demonstration. Noth- 
ing, therefore, which we will quote from her 
published autobiography is for the sake of 
anecdote, but for what it implies about brain 
matter. 

(I do not mean, of course, that physicians 
have their capacity for sympathy lessened by 
their pursuits. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
was Professor of Anatomy at the Harvard 
Medical School, and a trained physiologist 
as well. Helen Keller thus writes (Life, p. 
135): *'I remember well the first time I 
saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had 
invited Miss Sullivan and me to call on him 
one Sunday afternoon. It was early in the 
spring, just after I had learned to speak. We 
202 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

were shown at once to his library, where we 
found him seated in a big arm-chair by an 
open fire which glowed and crackled on the 
hearth, thinking, he said, of other days. 
' And listening to the murmur of the River 
Charles,' I suggested. ' Yes,' he replied, 
' the Charles has many dear associations for 
me. ' There was an odor of print and leather 
in the room which told me that it was full of 
books, and I stretched out my hand instinc- 
tively to find them. My fingers lighted upon 
a beautiful volume of Tennyson's poems, and 
when Miss Sullivan told me what it was, I 
began to recite : 

' Break, break, break, 
On thy cold gray stones, C Sea! ' 

But I stopped suddenly. I felt, tears on my 
hand. I had made my beloved poet weep, 
and I was greatly disturbed.") 

When nineteen months old, Helen Keller 
had an attack, presumably of cerebro-spinal 
meningitis, which left her totally and perma- 
203 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

nently blind and deaf, and hence dumb also. 
Till her seventh year, therefore, she was 
wholly dependent upon her senses of smell, 
taste and touch for all her information. 
Hence, also, she could communicate her 
wants or feelings to others only by bodily 
actions which she had learned to associate 
in her mind with states of pleasure or of 
pain. On this account she was perpetually 
subject to fits of great excitement or anger, 
due to her inner feelings having such imper- 
fect outlets for expression, while she was 
equally deprived of direction from others. 
The best of us, though equipped with every 
means of communication by speech, tone, ges- 
ture and glance, with like return of the same 
from our fellows, are yet apt to be impatient 
at the slowness of others in understanding 
us. We can imagine, therefore, what it was 
to this child to have scarcely any way to ex- 
plain her wants except by throwing things, 
or herself, on the ground. 
If the Afferent is the origin of mental en- 
204 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

dowments, her father's pet dog and cat with 
full possession of sight and hearing, not to 
mention voice, were in better condition for 
development than she was. On March 6, 
1887, Helen 's teacher. Miss Sullivan, arrived, 
and her first endeavor was to begin teaching 
the child language by tracing on the palm of 
her hand the letters spelling the words 
'' doll " and " cake." Eepetitions of these 
word tracings continued until Helen could 
make them for herself, and by March 31 she 
could trace on her hand eighteen nouns and 
three verbs, without knowing, however, what 
they meant. On April 5, hardly a month 
from the beginning of her education, the 
awakening came. Miss Sullivan had her 
hold a mug in her hand at a pump, and as 
the cold water filled the mug and ran on her 
hand, the teacher traced anew the letters 
w-a-t-e-r on the palm of her free hand. Miss 
Sullivan writes: '^ She dropped the mug 
and stood as one transfixed. A new light 
came into her face. She spelled water 
205 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

several times." The great step was gained 
when this blind, deaf and dumb girl suddenly 
understood that the symbol traced in her 
palm meant — water. She had got a word! 
From that moment her personality was set 
free, like a prisoner allowed to leave a dark 
dungeon to go wherever he lists, for now for 
the first time she knew that everything had a 
name, which she could learn on her palm. 
' ' The next morning Helen got up like a radi- 
ant fairy. She has flitted from object to 
object, asking the name of everything, ' ' kiss- 
ing her teacher for the first time in her glad- 
ness. It is touching to read that she tried to 
teach her dog by tracing the word water on 
its paws. From this beginning her progress 
was rapid. In two years and a half she was 
studying arithmetic, geography, zoology and 
botany, and reading general literature. Mean- 
time she was asking questions about every- 
thing; and for its physiological interest in 
showing how a shut-in mind, so to speak, like 
hers, will work when once in possession of 
206 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the Logos faculty, we make this extract, 
p. 370: 

"Early in May, 1890 (fourth year of her 
training), she wrote on her tablet the follow- 
ing list of questions: 'I wish to write about 
things I do not understand. Wlio made the 
earth, and the seas and everything? What 
makes the sun hot? Where was I before I 
came to Mother? I know that plants grow 
from seeds which are in the ground, but I am 
sure people do not grow that way. I never 
saw a child plant. Little birds and chickens 
come out of eggs: I have seen them. (All 
blind persons who have no memory of eye- 
sight constantly speak of seeing, meaning 
thereby correctly enough mental sight, i.e., 
perceiving.) What was the egg before it was 
an eggi Why does not the earth fall; it is 
so large and heavy? Tell me something that 
Father Nature does.' " 

There was no stopping her now. She must 
know the origin of things. What human being 
does not ask this question? Does this univer- 
207 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

sal human trait come from any function of 
the automatic Afferent, or from the free 
Personality? 

When her teacher in reply (p. 371) told her 
that "men came to believe that all forces were 
manifestations of one power, and to that 
power they gave the name God, she soon 
asked, 'Where is God? Did you ever see 
God!' I told her that God was everywhere, 
and that she must not think of Him as a per- 
son, but as the life, the mind, the soul of 
everything. This pantheistic talk did not suit 
Helen. She interrupted me: 'Everything 
does not have life. The rocks have not life, 
and they cannot think.' " 

In March, 1890, three years after she began 
with her first word, she commenced to take 
lessons in articulate speech. On account of 
their complete illustration of physiological 
fact, we will quote a few passages in which 
she relates her experience in learning how 
to make Broca's convolution do this work. 
(Life, p. 60.) "I shall never forget the sur- 
208 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

prise and delight I felt when I uttered my 
first sentence, 'It is warm.' True, they were 
broken and stammering syllables, but they 
were human speech. My soul, conscious of 
new strength, came out of bondage. . . . No 
deaf child who has earnestly tried to speak 
the words which he has never heard, — ^to 
come out of the prison of silence, can forget 
the thrill of surprise which came over him 
when he uttered his first word. Only such an 
one can appreciate the eagerness with which 
I talked to my toys, or the delight I felt when 
at my call Mildred [her little sister] ran to 
me, or my dogs obeyed my voice. . . . But it 
must not be supposed that I could really talk 
in this short time. I needed Miss Sullivan's 
assistance constantly in my efforts to articu- 
late each sound clearly, and to combine all 
sounds in a thousand ways. Even now she 
calls my attention every day to mispro- 
nounced words. All teachers of the deaf 
know what this means, and only they can at 
all appreciate the peculiar difficulties with 
209 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

which I had to contend. In reading my teach- 
er 's lips, I was wholly dependent on my fin- 
gers. I had to use the sense of touch in 
catching the vibrations of the throat, the 
movements of the mouth, and the expression 
of the face, and often this sense was at fault. 
In such cases I was forced to repeat the words 
or sentences, sometimes for hours, until I felt 
the proper ring in my own voice. My work 
was practice, practice, practice. Discourage- 
ment and weariness cast me down frequently, 
but the next moment the thought that I should 
soon be at home and show my loved ones what 
I had accomplished spurred me on. 'My lit- 
tle sister will understand me now,' was a 
thought stronger than all obstacles. I used 
to repeat ecstatically, ' I am not dumb now ' ! " 
"Words are the mind's wings," as she wrote 
to Dr. Holmes. 

Helen Keller 's story of her life begins with 

a child in her seventh year, with each of the 

avenues of incoming and of outgoing speech 

closed to her. After two months language 

210 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

begins with one word lodged in her con- 
sciousness by a most circuitous brain path. 
The book ends with a young woman, a gradu- 
ate with honors of Eadcliffe College, versed 
in the sciences taught there, along with ex- 
tensive reading in Latin, Greek, French, Ger- 
man and English classics, passionately fond 
of poetry and of history, a writer of the 
purest English style, and a thinker of no 
mean order, as is sufficiently illustrated by a 
remark of hers (p. 295) : '' Toleration is the 
greatest gift of the mind ; it requires the same 
effort of the brain that it takes to balance 
one's self on a bicycle." 

But, as we have already remarked, the phy- 
siological interest of her story is quite apart 
from the interest of her biography, great as 
that is. To a physiologist it is an example of 
a living brain, with the cells of the great vis- 
ual area entirely and forever atrophied or 
wasted away, because that is what happens 
to those textural cerebral elements in cases 
of her kind. No word for reading could ever 
211 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

be registered in her angular gyrus, nor in any 
neighboring visual cells. And just the same 
extinction of hearing cells was present in her 
temporal lobes, so that not one was left there 
to catch the sound of a word any more than 
that of any other sound. Broca's convolu- 
tion for uttering speech, therefore, could not 
have had a single "telephone" wire coming 
to it from either of these two great afferent 
centers. After a while Broca's convolution 
began to be rung up by thousands of reiter- 
ated messages coming from a wholly unusual 
quarter in the brain, namely, the center of the 
sense of touch. ''Practice, practice, prac- 
tice, ' ' by the hour at a time — the work of an 
indomitable personal will — finally makes that 
convolution submit to this perpetual stimula- 
tion from the tactile area, till it becomes 
ready to do what Helen purposes, whether to 
speak, to read aloud or to write. 

Now it happens that the sense of touch is 
the most diffused of all the senses at the sur- 
face of the body, so that it is not localized in 
212 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

one organ, like the eye or the ear. On that 
account it is the least specialized of any of 
the senses, so much so that its anatomical seat 
in the brain center is even yet not fully 
demonstrated. By itself, therefore, this 
sense could not afford the mind much definite 
information. But personality with a purpose 
can specialize anything nervous. The United 
States Treasury paid a high salary to a man 
on account of the one fact that while he could 
count gold pieces by the hundred thousand 
with great rapidity, he would instantly toss 
out either a defective or a fraudulent coin, 
because for such detection his touch was 
infallible. 

In normal individuals Broca's convolution 
is in constant communication with the affer- 
ent speech centers, those of the ear and eye 
respectively by numerous nerve fibers pass- 
ing between them with just that function. 
This is proved by the occurrence of many in- 
stances of word-deafness or word-blindness 
during life, in which after death the injury 
213 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

was found not in the gray matter of the con- 
volutions, but in the track of the white fibers 
leading from them. It is difficult on that ac- 
count to decide in some patients with aphasia 
whether the damage has occurred in the gray 
cortex or in the subjacent conducting white 
matter, for the effects would be much the 
same in either case. Normally, however, 
there can be but very few if any nerve fibers 
connecting Broca 's convolution with the area 
of the sense of touch. How are we to sup- 
pose, therefore, that in Helen Keller's case 
the afferent speech which she learned through 
the sense of touch made such abundant con- 
nections with the speech-uttering center, that 
she could talk to others in all the ways char- 
acteristic of the function of Broca 's center 
in ordinary persons? 

We have to mention now in explanation 
certain facts about nerve fibers which we 
have not alluded to before. A nerve fiber is 
really a prolongation or part of the nerve 
cell from which it originates, and is itself 
214 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

as much gray matter as the cell to which it 
belongs. Now one of the most important 
facts about these fibrils of gray matter is 
that they can grow, and that they grow in 
the direction of the stimulus which courses 
through them. Thus, if a nerve be cut so that 
the two severed ends remain at some distance 
from each other, in a few weeks it is fouuji 
that new nerve fibers sprout out of the stump 
end nearest the source of its origin until the 
gap is bridged. This property is taken ad- 
vantage of in surgery to restore the sensi- 
bility and mobility of a part when that has 
been lost by severance of its nerves. Hence 
while it is true that such regeneration does 
not occur apparently in the conducting fibers 
of the brain itself, yet there is no improba- 
bility in the surmise that repeated currents 
of stimuli will in time project, as it were, new 
tracts of fibers from one cerebral convolution 
to another, for that would be only in keeping 
with facts already ascertained of the devel- 
opment of great and important tracts of ner^ 
215 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

voTis fibers as a child grows. Thus, in the 
human infant at birth, the great pyramidal 
tract, as it is called, which connects the motor 
area of the cerebral cortex with the spinal 
cord, and by which all voluntary movements 
are executed, is far less developed than it 
will be four years later. As the child by prac- 
tice learns to use its hands and feet, new 
nerve fibers by the thousand grow from the 
motor center of the cortex, to go down and 
make connections with the motor centers 
of the spinal cord. Such, moreover, must be 
the case in the organizing of the speech 
centers in the speaking hemisphere of the 
brain. If either the reading angular con- 
volution, on the one hand, or the word hear- 
ing temporal convolution on the other, had 
no fibers developed for connecting them 
with their corresponding speech uttering 
convolution, as well as with each other, 
the person might read or hear words, but 
could not speak at all, a fact clearly de- 
monstrated by post-mortem findings, in 
216 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

wliich the brain injury lias been limited to 
the conducting fibers of Broca's convolution 
only, the speech centers themselves being in- 
tact. But this capacity for sending forth new 
fibers to make connections diminishes rapidly 
with age ; hence, when an apoplectic clot ruins 
the speech centers after sixty years of age, 
the loss of speech is almost invariably per- 
manent, because the corresponding speech 
convolutions in the other hemisphere not only 
are unable separately to learn their words, 
but the power to generate new connecting 
fibers between the convolutions, which is 
equally necessary for perfect speech, is no 
longer available. 

Another important conclusion is led up to 
by these facts, namely, that we can make our 
own brains, so far as special mental functions 
or aptitudes are concerned, if only we have 
wills strong enough to take the trouble. By 
practice, practice, practice, as in Miss Kel- 
ler's case, the Will stimulus will not only 
organize brain centers to perform new func- 
217 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tions, but will project new connecting, or, as 
they are technically called, association fibers, 
which will make nerve centers work together 
as they could not without being thus associ- 
ated. Each such self-created brain center 
requires great labor to make it, because noth- 
ing but the prolonged exertion of the per- 
sonal will can fashion anything of the kind, 
A person, therefore, acquires new brain 
capacities by acquiring new anatomical bases 
for them in the form both of brain cells, 
which he has trained, and of actively work- 
ing brain fibers, which he has himself vir- 
tually created. 

But nothing could show better than these 
facts the complete antithesis between per- 
sonality and automatism. One might as 
well insist that because an automobile car- 
riage goes along smoothly and mechanic- 
ally, that the driver, who makes the vehicle 
turn any number of street corners, must 
also be an automaton, as to say that a per- 
son who educates his brain is himself the 
218 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

automatic product of the brain which he edu- 
cates. 

This series of facts which we have been 
reviewing demonstrates how the different 
places in one hemisphere come to subserve 
their mental functions by a process of educa- 
tion carried on throughout by one and the 
same teacher, for the process itself never 
varies. Moreover it is plain that these highly 
educated areas in the cortex are not self- 
taught, because they would not exist only in 
one hemisphere when the capacity for such 
education was certainly originally equal in 
both. But what is that teacher, and whence 
does he come? It is not easy to suppose that 
any part of the brain itself can act as such a 
general teacher, because no cortical area ever 
interchanges its capacities with any other. 
If the ear grows dull of hearing the eye can- 
not help it hear better, nor can the cuneus, 
while indispensable for the education of the 
word seeing angular gyrus which is a part of 
the visual area, furnish a damaged music 
219 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

center in the temporal lobe with a single note. 
But so persistent has been the hunt for some 
cerebral place which created the personality 
that, since the rest of the cortex has been 
shown to subserve merely sensory and motor 
functions, it has been suggested that the 
limited portion called the prefrontal lobe (see 
Plate I) is the special mind seat in the brain. 
As this region differs from the rest of the 
frontal lobe in having no relation to motor, 
and equally none to sensory functions, so that 
it shows no signs of anything in particular 
when experimented upon, it has been sur- 
mised that it is related in its function to pure 
thinking, or to the mind itself. It is also 
claimed that it is more developed in the t 
human than in any other brain. The chief 
reliance for the support of this theory, how- 
ever, has rested upon reports of the effects 
in man of accidents, or of tumors, or such like 
damage to this locality, upon the mental func- 
tions. It is alleged that those who have suf- 
fered from lesions of this sort often change 
220 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

in disposition, with a special enfeeblement of 
the power of attention and of thought con- 
centration, along with consequent apathy 
or mental dullness amounting sometimes to 
dementia. 

But just such mental symptoms often ac- 
company damage to other parts than this of 
the brain, and all are equally susceptible of 
interpretation on the supposition of conse- 
quent derangements of the cerebral circula- 
tion. But to demonstrate that injury to the 
prefrontal region directly causes these men- 
tal symptoms, they should uniformly accom- 
pany such physical changes. This is so far 
from being the case as to lead Professor 
Schaf er to remark : ^ "So much has been 
made of certain clinical cases in which an ex- 
tensive lesion of the frontal lobes was fol- 
lowed by diminution of the intellectual facul- 
ties, and by a change for the worse in the gen- 
eral disposition of the individual, that it is 
important to ascertain what the clinical evi- 

^ Textbook of Physiology, vol. ii., pp. 772-77a 

221 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

dence on this point really amounts to. Welt 
has collected fifty-nine cases of lesions con- 
fined to the frontal region in man; of these 
forty-seven, or about 80 per cent., showed no 
changes in intellectual capacity or character ; 
and only twelve of the total number, or 20 
per cent, had such changes recorded against 
them. It is clear, therefore, that the doc- 
trine of special localization of the intellectual 
faculties in this portion of the frontal lobes 
rests on no sufficient basis." 

On p. 63 is given the particulars of the man 
who had one hemisphere, and particularly its 
' frontal part, destroyed by disease, without 
affecting his mind at all. Fortunately for 
him, it was his wordless and not his word en- 
dowed hemisphere which was involved. Like- 
wise a great difference is found in the ac- 
companying mental derangements of frontal 
lesions, whether they occur in the wordless 
hemisphere, when often there are no mental 
symptoms at all, or in the educated half. For 
the purposes of our argument, we might 
222 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

readily admit that the frontal convolutions 
can be taught important mental functions, 
just as areas in the occipital and in the tem- 
poral convolutions are thus taught. But until 
it can be shown that the frontal convolutions 
think at all, whether they have been taught 
or not, that is, that the frontal lobes of both 
hemispheres work the thinker, all these specu- 
lations about them are vain. It is not im- 
probable that the prefrontal convolutions of 
the educated hemisphere do play an impor- 
/ tant part in mental operations, but that does 
not show that they are a whit less instru- 
ments than the angular gyrus is in its reading 
function, or Broca's convolution in its func- 
tion. Of the four strings of a violin, string 
A is struck oftener than string G to make 
music, but string A does not make the other 
strings play; much less is it itself the mu- 
sician. 

From some examples in my own experience 
I would infer that one of the functions of the 
prefrontal convolutions in the speech hemi- 
223 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

sphere is the recognition of personal identity. 
A gentleman once consulted me in my office 
about some nervous symptoms. For reasons 
unnecessary to detail here I began to suspect 
that he might be suffering from the effects of 
a brain tumor, but the most careful exami- 
nation failed to show that any one of his 
special senses, on being separately tested, 
was affected in the least, nor could I find any 
motor derangements. His speech was well 
articulated, and he expressed himself clearly. 
Suddenly he said : ' ' Where am 1 1 Am I here 
or somewhere else? Am I in the body or out 
of it?" These remarks confirmed me in my 
suspicions that the probable seat of the lesion 
was in the left frontal lobe. Some months 
afterwards my surmise was proved correct 
at the autopsy, when a tumor was found in 
that very place. 

We may remark here that the facts about 
the marvelous processes of education of the 
speech endowed hemisphere naturally sug- 
gest the question, whether the elaboration of 
224 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

so many interpreting or association areas, 
with their consequent maze of association 
fibers, would not in time increase the actual 
amount of gray matter and its fibers in those 
localities where special work has been spent 
upon them by the individual. 

This may be difficult to demonstrate by our 
present imperfect methods of physical in- 
spection of nervous matter. Though func- 
tionally the difference is wide enough be- 
tween a purely sensory and a purely motor 
nerve, so far we are unable to see which is 
which, and we have to irritate or to cut them 
to find out. So no inspection of the gray mat- 
ter of the speech centers tells us any more of 
their very special powers than the inspection 
of any other locality in a given cortical area 
reveals what it does or how it does it. About 
the only physical sign of the kind yet demon- 
strated is the presence in the motor area of 
the cortex of relatively large and stellate- 
shaped cells which resemble in these particu- 
lar respects the cells at the origin of the 
225 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

motor nerves of the spinal cord. But all 
analogy with other living textures would lead 
us to infer that the more a part was exer- 
cised, the more it would grow in its special 
components, and hence that the cortical layers 
of a man, sharing fully in all the mental ac- 
tivities of modern civilized life, would be 
more developed, even quantitatively, than the 
thoughtless brains of a Papuan savage. The 
only way in which such increased brain 
growth could occur in the cranial cavity 
would be by increased folding of the gray 
cortex, with multiplication of its associating 
fibers. A few investigations of the kind have 
been made of the brains of men distinguished 
for varied mental acquisitions during life, 
and when compared with the brains of sav- 
ages or of men of low or abnormal intellectual 
grade, they seem to show, though with some 
exceptions, that in the speech centers espe- 
cially, the brains of highly cultivated men 
present much greater complexity in the con- 
volutions, with greater depth of the fissures. 
226 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

But though further investigations may dem- 
onstrate fairly constant post-mortem evi- 
dences in the form of increased cortical convo- 
lutions of a long life of exceptional mental 
activity, this would not prove at all that their 
subjects became eminent because they were 
born with such convoluted brains. While it is 
doubtless true that all individuals of our race 
are not born with equally good brains, yet 
the fact remains that the special mental 
capacities for which certain men have become 
eminent were all acquired and were not con- 
genital. Hence the utmost which can be 
conceded is that the greater aptitude for ac- 
quiring may be congenital, but nothing more ; 
because however apt a man may be in learn- 
ing languages or in mastering mathematics, 
he did not know a word, nor could he count 
two when he was born, and if it had been pos- 
sible to examine his brain when he was four 
years old, there would not have been found a 
single one of the complicated brain folds 
which he had when he was sixty, because he 
227 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

made all these latter himself by persistent 
exercise. In other words, a great person- 
ality may possibly make a great brain, but 
no brain can make a great personality. 

To sum np. Our subject deals primarily 
with material facts. Hence it is in no sense 
a speculative subject, because anatomical de- 
tails are neither speculative nor theoretical, 
and we have been concerned with the anatomi- 
cal seats of mental faculties. We began with 
the physical anatomy of the faculty of speech, 
which demonstrates that the reception, the 
understanding and the expression of words 
depend as absolutely upon a special brain 
mechanism as the movements of the hands of 
a watch depend upon the spring inside. But 
much more than thaty the particular anatomi- 
cal seats of human intelligence are just as 
palpably demonstrable as the seats of human 
language. These so-called ' ' mind ' ' areas of 
brain matter are found grouped around the 
congenital sense areas, and it is by them 
that the human being knows what to think 
228 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

about the information which his senses bring. 
Cut out any one of those areas, and forthwith 
ijs kind of intelligence is gone. 

The most materialistic theory of the rela- 
tion of thought to brain substance could not 
ask for more solid facts to support its con- 
tention, if only it could be demonstrated that 
these brain localities, with their matchless 
endowments, were as native to the brain as 
its sensory centers are. But no human being 
ever brought with him a single one of these 
wondrous places in his brain, nor ever in- 
herited them. Yet their existence must some- 
how be accounted for. No question about 
physical life equals this question for surpass- 
ing significance. Not being native, that is, 
congenital, it follows that these seats of men- 
tal faculty must all be artificially acquired. 
It is equally plain that the process by which 
they are acquired must be the same for them 
all, however different their functions be, be- 
cause as an anatomical fact they are all found 
in only one of the two hemispheres. 
229 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

This feature, therefore, puts an entirely- 
new aspect on the whole matter. No longer 
can we suppose that the pair of symmetrical 
brain hemispheres in our skulls hold just the 
same relations to the functions of thought 
that the two eyes do to the function of sight, 
or the two ears to that of hearing; because 
if in a young person one eye be covered, the 
other eye does not have to wait for months 
before it can learn to see as its fellow did, 
nor if one ear be stopped for experiment in 
a person after fifty, does its companion ear 
then prove to be totally deaf. Hence, while 
both members of the eye and ear organs are 
at all times just alike in their work, it is 
surely significant that with the two brain 
hemispheres it is entirely different — so dif- 
ferent indeed that no contrast could be 
greater than that existing between them in 
their capacity for mental work. 

Physicians frequently meet with striking 
illustrations of this one-sided habitat of the 
mind. A man who was one of the strongest 
230 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

thinkers and one of the greatest masters of 
English style that I have ever known, had 
his mind totally wrecked one morning by an 
apoplectic clot. But though he lived for 
months afterwards with his right brain 
hemisphere apparently as sound as ever, yet 
he could not recognize the dearly loved mem-, 
bers of his family either by sight or by their 
voices. His intelligence was simply suddenly 
annihilated by the injury in his left hemi- 
sphere. The fact that his right hemisphere 
remained uninjured availed nothing, because 
this exceptional musician had never played 
with that right violin, and now that it was 
seventy years old it was no longer mu- 
sical. 

Therefore it is a Power not of the brain, 
because it is the masterful personal Will, 
which makes the brain human. By a human 
brain we mean one which has been slowly 
fashioned into an instrument by which the 
personality can recognize and know all things 
physical, from the composition of a pebble 
231 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

to the elements of a fixed star. It is the will 
alone which can make material seats for 
mind, and when made they are the most per- 
sonal things in a man's body. In fact they 
are the only examples of the kind in his phys- 
ical frame, because, though he cannot make 
one hair of his head white or black, he can 
and does make speech centers inside of his 
head, to say nothing of other centers of most 
varied faculty. So long as his brain matter 
has not become " set," as potters would ex- 
press it, by the lapse of years, he deals with 
his cortical gray matter by the purposive ex- 
ercise of memorizing habit, as the potter 
deals with wet clay. And wondrously does 
he fashion it, until it no more resembles the 
same gray matter on the other side of his 
head in mental capacities, than unfashioned 
clay resembles a Portland vase. How could 
this clay itself make this peerless vase? 

Considering that it is not brain which 
makes man, but man who makes one of his 
brain hemispheres human in mental faculties 
232 



THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

we might even say that if a human person- 
ality would enter a young chimpanzee 's brain 
where it would find all the required cerebral 
convolutions, that ape could then grow into 
a true inventor or philosopher. 



233 



CHAPTER IX 

PRACTICAL. APPLICATIONS 

We have definitely concluded that the facts 
both of brain anatomy and of brain physi- 
ology indicate that this organ of the person- 
ality is never other than its instrument, 
while the personality itself is as different and 
as separate from it as the violinist is separate 
from, and not the product of his violin. 

As already demonstrated, one of the prop- 
erties of the personal human will is that of 
being a specific brain stimulus, more potent 
than all the afferent stimuli together in pro- 
ducing changes in brain matter, by which the 
brain acquires, and by it alone, entirely new 
powers or functions not possible in any other 
animal brain. This great truth would suf- 
fice of itself to prove that the Will is a new 
thing, for the only other fashioner of nerve 
234 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

tissue is the Afferent, and we have shown 
that in their fashioning processes the Affer- 
ent and the Will are generically distinct, and 
have no relationship to each other. 

Indeed, as a final contrast, we may say that 
the Afferent can do nothing new any more 
than a watch can. AVliatever a watch does 
is the result of pre-arrangement in its mech- 
anism. Likewise a nervous center is so 
slowly organized by the mechanically acting 
Afferent — evidently requiring the co-opera- 
tion of heredity for many generations — that 
it will do only one thing during life and no 
other. But a Will act, ordinarily called a 
voluntary act, is not often just the same thing 
when repeated. The variety of voluntary 
acts is practically unlimited, on account of a 
profound principle underlying Will by virtue 
of its own nature, namely, perfect freedom. 

Having recognized what a portentous 
change comes over the whole situation by the 
entrance of this highest attribute of person- 
ality, nothing could exceed the importance 
235 



br:^in and personality 

of showing what, according to physiology, is 
the rightful place and rank of the "Will in a 
human being. This question of rank is an 
actual and not a theoretical one in the con- 
sideration of any subject in nervous physi- 
ology. As we have remarked before, it is 
only in a nervous system that the element of 
rank has any place. But there it is all im- 
portant, because no principle is more funda- 
mental than that of control of the working 
of all the lower nerve centers by the centers 
which are higher than they in the scale and 
in the time of their development. Therefore 
what is and always should be the governing 
power in our living selves is a proper subject 
of physiology as well as of philosophy. 

Approaching this subject, therefore, from 
the side of physiology, we must begin by re- 
ferring to what is said on pp. 157-9 about 
Inhibition. It is well for the ordinary reader 
to appreciate the importance which is at- 
tached to inhibition, as its technical term is, 
by physiologists in their interpretation of 
236 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

nervous functions. Without inhibition no or- 
ganization of a nervous system would be pos- 
sible; and therefore we may explain again 
that by this term is meant that the operations 
of nervous centers, instead of being allowed 
to go on independently, are constantly con- 
trolled, restrained, checked, or altogether 
suspended from moment to moment, accord- 
ing to time needs, by the direct intervention, 
that is, ' ' inhibition ' ' of other nerve centers, 
or even sometimes by nerves specially en- 
dowed with this restraining power. 

"We there cited in illustration how the me- 
dulla oblongata sends a bundle of nerve fibers 
to the heart, called the heart accelerators, 
which make it beat faster, while it also sup- 
plies an important strand of nerves which 
bridle the heart and make it beat slowly and 
deliberately. But the reader may consult a 
modern text-book of physiology to find an- 
other striking illustration of nervous regula- 
tion of the heart, under the title, the De- 
^ pressor Nerve. Ever since Ludwig and Cyon 

237 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

first discovered the function of this small 
nerve in 1866, physiologists have been 
greatly interested in its unique properties, 
one being, as demonstrated by its first dis- 
coverers, that it can quickly lower the pres- 
sure of the blood in the arteries all over the 
body from 30 to 50 per cent. To understand 
this it should be stated that in the medulla 
oblongata there is the center governing the 
entire and most extensive system of special 
nerves which ramify on the coats of the arter- 
ies, and whose business it is to regulate the 
caliber of the arteries so that their diameter 
becomes large or small according to whether 
the part which the arteries supply needs more 
or less blood. Thus, the stomach needs nine 
times more blood when actively digesting its 
contents than when it is empty, and the vaso- 
motor nerves, as they are called, of its arter- 
ies dilate the arteries to bring more blood, or 
contract them to shut it off, as the need may 
be. The function of these nerves, therefore, 
is of prime importance, for without their con- 
238 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

stricting action the vessels of the abdominal 
organs alone might relax enough to contain 
most of the blood of the body, as sometimes 
happens with quickly fatal results. But, on 
the other hand, during violent muscular ex- 
ercise or under excitement, the blood may be 
driven to the heart so fast that its cavities 
become dangerously distended. Then it is 
that the Depressor Nerve instantly comes to 
the rescue. Ignoring its automatic nature, 
we may figuratively represent it addressing 
the medulla thus: " Make haste! Emer- 
gency! Heart overfilling and distending so 
with blood that a valve may give way ! Tell 
your vaso-constrictor center instantly to 
order all its nerves to relax their grip on the 
arteries the body over, to the degree which 
I direct. Order the accelerator center to sus- 
pend operations ; and the vagus center to give 
an extra turn to its brakes! " The medulla 
obeys, and the over-full heart immediately re- 
lieves itself by a general widening of its 
arterial channels. Thus we find this single 
239 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

afferent nerve capable of inhibiting the 
action of the whole vast mechanism of the 
artery constrictors, so that when this nerve 
has been experimentally stimulated by an 
electric current, the tongue swells from its 
arteries being dilated, and likewise the kid- 
neys are flushed red with blood. Also, unlike 
other nerves, it cannot be fatigued or ex- 
hausted by prolonged stimulation, so that in 
every respect it is like a sleepless, tireless 
sentinel posted at the great gate of the 
heart's outflow. 

These are only illustrations of the nervous 
mechanism before there is added to it a sin- 
gle one of the great brain ganglia with their 
high and complex functions. If in the array 
of the spinal centers we find at every turn 
special disciplinary arrangements in the 
shape of specific appointments, so to speak, 
of nerve centers with their special nerves to 
act as checks or controls over the whole sys- 
tem, we will find still plainer illustrations of 
the function of Inhibition or control in the 
240 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

great army of cerebral centers. Whole tracts 
of nerve fibers descend from the brain, cours- 
ing along the nervous strands of the cord till 
each fiber ends at, but not in, a spinal nerve 
cell. Forthwith that nerve fiber rules the 
spinal nerve cell absolutely, by directing how 
it is to act and do this or that according to 
commands coming from above. The spinal 
motor cells move all bones of the body by the 
muscles attached to them, as we have said, 
but every such movement is subject to the 
behest of the brain fiber. 

But just as there are fibers passing from 
the brain above to the cord below, so all cere- 
bral collections of gray matter have fibers 
coursing between them. These, as we have 
stated before, are called Association fibers, as 
they pass from lobe to lobe, from lobule to 
lobule, and from convolution to convolution. 
That these extremely numerous connections 
between the cortical centers with each other 
are for the purpose of bringing the different 
functions of each into communication and re- 
241 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

lation with the others, is not doubted by any 
one. According to all precedent in the ner- 
vous system, it follows that this anatomical 
fact indicates that the great law of inhibition 
must be the necessary law governing the men- 
tal operations of the brain itself. Each 
thinking center, acting by itself, without be- 
ing controlled by other centers, would in- 
evitably act foolishly. This is the reason of 
the absurdity of dreams. In dreams some 
nerve centers happen to awaken by them- 
selves, and thus start ideas without any con- 
trol or correction from other nerve centers 
which are still asleep, and which if they were 
also awake would tell them: " That is not 
true ; stop, till I think with you ! ' ' 

The facts of delirium are also best ex- 
plained as a result of the suspension, through 
paralysis of their inhibitory nerves, of the 
control of higher centers over lower ones, 
which then run riot with their unchecked 
fancies or ideas. That this is true is proven 
by the fact that just such disorders can be 
242 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

imitated by administering agents like opimn 
and alcohol, which, as we know by experi- 
ments on animals, have this same property 
of paralyzing nerve inhibition, whether in the 
brain or in the spinal cord. A well-balanced 
brain, therefore, is one which, when some one 
center starts an idea, waits till the answer 
comes from all the other nerve centers which 
have communicating fibers with that center 
as to what they also think about it. 

One other fact also should be mentioned 
here. ''As quick as thought" is a prover- 
bial phrase which a physiologist would not 
care to use, for he has ingeniously devised 
means by which to measure the rate of trans- 
mission of a nerve impulse both up a sensory 
nerve and down a motor one, with the result 
that it averages about 180 feet a second in the 
first, and 160 in the second instance. Now 
some have imagined that nerve currents are 
somehow allied to electrical currents, but 
while the nerve current vibration travels not 
more than 200 feet, an electrical current dur- 
243 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

ing the same time traverses a copper wire at 
the rate of 180,000 miles a second. Between 
the two, therefore, there is a greater dis- 
parity than between the fastest of express 
trains and the slowest crawl of a snail. More 
than that, when an afferent stimulus reaches 
a nerve center a marked delay occurs before 
an efferent response emerges from that cen- 
ter. As Sir Michael Foster expresses it: 
" The advent of an afferent impression by 
the afferent nerve is a busy time for the cen- 
ter, during which many processes, of which 
we have very little exact knowledge, are be- 
ing carried on in it." It takes some time to 
deliberate what it will do. The shortest 
period of a reflex act has also been measured 
in a few simple reflex arcs, only to show that 
the delay at the center exceeds in time both 
afferent inflow and efferent outflow. Hence 
when several nerve centers have to adjust 
themselves to know what they are all to do 
about some afferent excitation, one center 
sometimes inhibiting the other during the 
244 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

process, the final outcome may seem to be a 
very deliberate affair. Without knowing it, 
therefore, a man may have good physiology 
in his exclamation, — " If only I had stopped 
to think! " 

But to return to the subject of the physio- 
logical rank of the Will. As we have ex- 
plained before, the higher centers do not sup- 
press or abolish the functions of the lower 
centers, but restrain, regulate and direct 
them instead. They, in fact, establish their 
prerogative to govern by governing, and 
when needful they soon prove their title by 
doing so. 

We have already demonstrated the mighty 
work of the will in dealing with brain matter 
as the potter does with clay, and that it is 
the will alone that has that power. But on 
that same account we are now to show that 
in thus making an instrument for the mind 
to use, the Will is higher than the Mind, and 
hence that its rightful prerogative is to gov- 
ern and to direct the mind, just as it is the 
245 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

prerogative of the mind to govern and direct 
the body. No teaching of physiology is more 
important than this, and its truth is empha- 
sized by the great facts of human life which 
themselves both illustrate and confirm it. 

Thus the rule is universal that the higher 
in rank is responsible for the behavior of the 
lower. Hence it is that with the advent of 
the human Will there enters a principle into 
the living world which is entirely new, be- 
cause nothing like it is recognizable anywhere 
else. This principle pertains, and is applica- 
ble, to man alone, and not to any other crea- 
ture on earth. So transcendent in its bearings 
and applications is this principle, that we 
may well pause to note what it implies about 
the real nature of the human will, because, 
owing solely to what his will is, on man alone 
rests the weight of Personal Eesponsibility. 
Therefore man himself cannot possibly be a 
living machine, however much his mind may 
answer to that description, for no machine 
can be responsible for anything, because a 
246 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

machine can do only what it is constructed 
for. Nor can a mere animal be held responsi- 
ble for anything, for even though it be high 
enough in the scale to have a mind, and some 
animals certainly do have minds, yet they 
are virtually so fully the creatures of the 
mechanical Afferent that they have no true 
power of choice. But man can always do or 
not do as he chooses, or, in other words, wills. 
Therefore this very different thing, his will, 
makes him different from every other 
earthly living thing. Therefore something 
is expected and taken for granted about him, 
which is not expected of any other being. In 
fact man reigns here below only because he 
is responsible, and it is his will alone which 
makes him responsible. 

Human responsibility, on account of man 's 
possession of a virtually all-controlling will, 
if he chooses to exercise it, is such an unwel- 
come doctrine to many reasoners that every 
effort has been made to disprove the freedom 
of the will. We, however, cannot follow this 
247 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

contention when it travels off into the far 
fields of metaphysics, except just enough to 
enable us to bring the disputant back to our 
province of physiology. 

Thus it is contended that the human will 
is not free because it is itself the product of 
motives. As Spinoza expressed it, men are 
free as to their acts, but not free as to the 
motives which determine these acts. A 
motiveless will is no will at all, because a will 
can act only as it has a motive or motives, 
and, therefore, it cannot exist apart from 
motives. Hence, as it is the motives which 
make the will, man's will is not free, simply 
because it has to submit to the strongest 
motive. 

The fatal flaw in this reasoning is that it 
confounds a thing with the conditions of a 
thing. One might as well deny the power of 
steam, because it cannot do anything with- 
out first being confined within the sides of a 
boiler, as to 'deny the power of the will be- 
cause its operations are always conditioned 
248 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

by motives. A steam engine may be a perfect 
engine, but it may work very feebly if it has 
not enough steam. So a man may have and 
may appreciate to the utmost, all the motives 
for a given line of conduct, but may weep, 
not because of lack of motives, but from lack 
of will power to act upon those motives. In 
our concluding chapter we will allude to a 
great physiological reason for this too fre- 
quent lament. 

But, after all, the practical experience of 
human life is the best test of the truth of 
any theories, and especially of metaphysical 
theories. Men have never doubted the fact 
of human responsibility, nor the reason why 
every man is responsible. 

One illustration of this truth will suffice. 
Go into any court of law on earth, whether 
in America, in Europe, in Turkey or in China, 
and see there the criminal and the judge. 
Can the criminal in effect say anywhere or 
in any language, '' Judge, you should not 
punish me, a poor machine, whose efferent 
249 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

acts are the necessary result of my afferent 
impulses! Think in my case how old, how 
hereditary and natural the afferent impulse 
was. I was starving, and in order to eat I 
stole." The reply of any judge the world 
over to such a plea would have to be the same, 
for there is one human fact upon which all 
human law is based. It assumes that there 
is a central power in every man which must 
be stronger than impulse, whether single or 
multiform, and that men must be punished 
if it is not thus stronger. The judge, there- 
fore, answers to such pleading: " You are 
a man, and so have the power of choice. How- 
ever strong and however numerous or sud- 
den the impulses of passion or the cravings 
of nature may be, you still have within you 
the ability to choose not to yield to those im- 
pulses, and on that account alone I am here 
to judge you. If you did not have that power, 
I could have no jurisdiction over you. If you 
were a mere animal, a noble lion or a cun- 
ning ape, or anything like them, you would 
250 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

not be brought here before me whatever you 
did. But because you are a raan, and as a 
man have the power of choice, you now find 
yourself in court, because when you were 
hungry you did not act like a man but like a 
hungry animal, and you shall be punished 
because you did act like an animal." 

This illustration is enough to prove at 
once that the power of choice, or, in other 
words, the Will, in man, cannot possibly be 
mechanical or the product of afferent im- 
pulse, because it is plainly above impulse or 
else it would not be expected always to rule 
impulse. Therefore it must be free from the 
tyranny of the Afferent, for if it were not 
thus free, there would be no responsibility; 
and if there be no responsibility, then there 
can be no human law whatever. To admit 
that this principle can ever have an excep- 
tion in law, whereby impulse could ever law- 
fully become stronger than the will, would 
be forthwith the abrogation of all law. Law's 
very existence depends upon the responsi- 
251 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

bility of men, because they have a will which 
always ought to be the master and not the 
slave, still less the product of afferent im- 
pulse. 

Such being the presumption of all human 
law about the rank of the will as regards con- 
duct, what do the facts of human life in gen- 
eral testify as to the relative station of the 
mind and the will? Chief among the facul- 
ties of the human mind are memory, imagina- 
tion, speech, knowledge, conception and 
judgment; this last leading to the mind's 
highest attribute. Reason. No wonder that 
these splendid endowments should lead many 
to think that there can be nothing higher in 
us than the mind. But in the order of de- 
velopment, physiology emphatically states, 
and the whole world proves it to be true, that 
.the mind is not only the subordinate, but well 
nigh invariably the merest servant in man of 
the will, and by it often as despotically ruled 
as the mind in turn often despotically rules 
the body. 

252 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

One proof of the secondary place held by 
the mind, the significance of which is often 
not sufficiently appreciated, is the fact that 
the mind is easily detached from the per- 
sonality, while such is never the case with 
the will. The mind is so detachable that it 
can be made to work like any other machine, 
as its owner sees fit. A prominent body of 
professional men among us live by letting 
out the entire equipment of their mental 
faculties for hire. After a lawyer has ac- 
cepted a retainer, he commands his mind 
forthwith to busy itself with all its resources 
of reasoning and of persuasion for the party 
who pays him. Even his emotions, from the 
extremes of pathos to those of indignation, 
may be pressed into the service as well. But 
no man can let out his will for hire, and he 
lies when he pretends to. The will refuses 
to be displaced from the personality by any- 
thing on earth, or sometimes in heaven. 

But this subject wears a grave aspect when 
it is recognized that, owing to its original pre- 
253 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

rogative, the Will always holds a retainer on 
the Reason in practical life. The Reason may 
sometimes timidly propose to its master a 
series of arguments which it knows will not 
be welcome, only to be ordered to come back 
again with a more acceptable line of " rea- 
sons." It is this fact which explains why 
opinions, either political or religious, can and 
do have well-defined geographical rather 
than mental boundaries. The Strait of 
Calais is like a rivulet compared to the his- 
torical separation between the English and 
French views; while as to the Strait of Gi- 
braltar, Morocco is much farther away from 
all Europe in every belief and principle than 
Japan. But one especial historical illustra- 
tion of this truth we had in America. Before 
the year 1861 a boundary, called, after two 
surveyors, Mason's and Dixon's line, divided 
the United States, not only geographically but 
politically, intellectually and morally. Not- 
withstanding all the sophistries about other 
issues, there lay, as Lincoln said in Ms im.- 
254 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

mortal second Inaugural, as the chief cause 
of all the fierce antagonism between the two 
geographical sections of the country, a dif- 
ference of opinion about the institution of 
African slavery. Was it because the reason- 
ing faculties differed so between these two 
sections of the same English-born race? On 
one side of the line most men and women 
reasoned, and so supposed that they believed, 
that slavery was the sum of all evil; on the 
other side, most men and women reasoned, 
till they supposed that they believed, that 
slavery was a good, if not a divine, institution. 
Nor was the dispute settled by reasoning. 

Some would-be reformers or philanthro- 
pists appear to rely upon increase of knowl- 
edge or of information in the world as the 
cure for the world's evils. If men's minds 
were but enlightened, then everything would 
go well ! The physiologist can only point out 
that such people, owing to their unfamiliar- 
ity with the constitution of this court, are ad- 
dressing the wrong official. Keason undoubt- 
255 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

edly does hold a high position at this court 
which no one can justly disparage, but at best 
it is only an adviser of its sovereign. In the 
future, as this master improves in motives, 
this official will doubtless be promoted with 
an increase of authority. But as the world 
is still constituted, the influence of Reason 
with the power which actually rules is at all 
times uncertain, because the effect depends 
on how the ruler is otherwise disposed. 
Should the Reason venture to be importunate, 
it meets with the summary answer of the 
Roman Caesar: Sic volo, sic juheo, stet pro 
ratione voluntas (So I will, so I command: 
For a reason let the wish stand) ! 

Therefore gain the ear of the Will first, and 
everything naturally, because physiologi- 
cally, follows. The world is to improve, not 
by an increase of knowing people (desirable 
as that is), but by an increase among its in- 
habitants of people with benevolent wills. 

One phase of this subject deserves notice. 
Though the mind is so detachable from the 
256 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

real self, men nevertheless are constantly 
liable to confound it with the self. No mis- 
take is greater and yet so common. Thus 
when on occasion this retained lawyer of the 
will is directed to reason and to talk volubly 
on all righteousness, men are deceived into 
believing that those who can talk so well must 
themselves he good. Both Seneca and Lord 
Bacon were among the meanest men of their 
bad times. The Eoman's Moral Maxims are 
admired to this day, but he was the man who 
scandalized even the hardened cynics of 
Nero's Rome by rising in the Senate to 
eulogize Nero for ripping open the body of 
his mother to see the womb that bore him. 
Indeed some men may be observed who, for 
the creditable showing virtuous declamation 
makes, proceed to display their own gifts of 
eloquence about goodness, much as they 
would lead out a horse to show his fine points. 
Another important aspect of the relation 
of the Will to the Mind is that just as with 
the creation of speech centers, the will like- 
257 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

wise so alters the brain that in time the brain 
thinks only according to certain habitual 
ways. Some strong but elderly men of my 
acquaintance, whose reasoning powers no 
one could pronounce weak, seem no more 
able to change their opinions than they could 
learn readily Turkish or Chinese. As a rule, 
it is only in the third or fourth decennials of 
life that men's minds show any capacity to 
be " converted " on any important matter 
of opinion. The cause for this is not from 
any enfeeblement of judgment attendant on 
the advent of middle age. Instead, the judg- 
ment as a faculty should then be much 
stronger than in youth, as indeed it generally 
proves to be if left free to act. But as the 
years pass, the judgment is less and less free 
to act. Those will elements, likes and dis- 
likes, in proportion to their intensity and 
duration, have steadily been fashioning the 
mind's physical instrument to work out only 
opinions to match, until to have new opinions 
they need to have literally new brains. The 
258 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

utmost that reason at any time can do is to 
persuade its master by adducing other 
motives, but an adult man who can be con- 
vinced against his will is well nigh a physi- 
ological impossibility. 

Why this is so we now see clearly. It must 
not be supposed that men ever really hold 
opinions which to them appear unreasonable. 
Their wills take good care that their reason- 
ing servant should always supply them with 
all the reasons which they want, and very 
well does this servant furnish its master with 
most cogent arguments to show the great 
*' reasonableness" of his views, especially if 
his master's interests, that is, wishes, are 
strongly enlisted. 

Men's interests come to them from such 
sources as their parentage, birthplace, party 
or sect, and the influences of these factors in 
life sway their reasoning as naturally and 
irresistibly as the wind carries with it the 
dust of a road. This subservience of reason 
to the will is simply physiological, and there- 
259 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

fore so unconscious that it is in no sense hypo- 
critical or insincere, however some may won- 
der at the intellectual feats in reasoning of 
those who have differed from them, not in 
mental faculty, but in their native environ- 
ment. No one should wonder at or resent 
any reasoning as such, for this subordinate in 
man has to do as he is bidden by his master. 
In short, the world has yet to learn, once for 
all, that men are not to be justified nor con- 
demned by such superficial things about them 
as their opinions. Set the will right first, and 
men's opinions will follow suit, as soon as 
they have opportunities for knowing better; 
but with the will remaining perverted, not the 
opportunities for knowing of an eternity will 
avail. 

One of the best promises for the future of 
our race is the fact that men are always 
touched, and the longest affected, by the spec- 
tacle among their fellows of an individual 
life of consistent goodness, itself due to a 
will attribute. Influence is an exclusively 
260 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

human word, and, in this world of changes 
by death, it is to be measured not alone by its 
extent, but by its duration. Judged thus, the 
influence of a simple-minded but loving 
mother may be perpetuated long after the 
eloquence of a score of famous orators has 
died away ; died away as only mind-produced 
words can utterly die away into empty space. 
Passing from the general to the individual, 
no subject should so commend itself to the 
serious attention of all educators and instruc- 
tors, as those physiological facts which ex- 
plain how the mind acts, and how the will 
acts. Every teacher and parent ought to learn 
all that they can about this subject. The 
thinking brain when left to itself is the seat of 
the play of the Afferent, responding mechan- 
ically to a thousand thousand afferent excita- 
tions pouring in upon it, in number as count- 
less as the birds of the air which come down 
from the north, south, east and west, on a 
field in Gennesaret to catch away the seed of 
the sower. We are not responsible for the 
261 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

thoughts which enter our minds. No man 
ever was. What we are responsible for is 
the thoughts which we allow to stay there, 
because we have a kingly power within us 
which can command this mechanically think- 
ing brain to do its thinking according to its 
behest ; just as the brain in turn can command 
the spinal cord to stop acting reflexly to its 
afferent excitations, and to act only accord- 
ing to the brain's behests. The Will, by its 
lawful, physiological, inhibitory power, can 
say to the thinking brain, these thoughts are 
good thoughts and valuable, therefore keep 
them; those other thoughts are purposeless 
and hence unprofitable, therefore dismiss 
them at once ; and a well-disciplined mind will 
obey. 

With what result? Here we come to the 
highest illustration of that great principle 
in nervous development. Discipline, for it is 
the Will, as the ranking official of all in man, 
who should now step forward to take the com- 
mand. We cannot overestimate the priceless 
262 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

value of such direction when completely ef- 
fective, for the life of the individual in this 
world. A mind always broken in to the sway 
of the will, and therefore thinking according 
to will, and not according to reflex sugges- 
tion, constitutes a purposive life. A man who 
habitually thinks according to purpose, will 
then speak according to purpose; and who 
will care to measure strength with such a 
man ? Such a man or woman is the very em- 
bodiment of living power. But the important 
practical truth to apply here is that no power 
so grows in us by exercise, or so weakens and 
atrophies by disuse, as the will. Teach a 
child self-restraint, and you are directly de- 
veloping thereby his will power. Soon he 
will himself learn the next lesson in will 
development, and win Carlyle's great equip- 
ment for life, the ability to take trouble. But 
physiology now adds that the will then alters 
the brain by creating new places for the mind 
to work with. It is the will which creates the 
man. 

263 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

When the age of three score is reached, 

men can give the best opinions about life, 

because most of its illusions have vanished, 

and well can they then comment on many a 

fellow traveler's course, though they may 

not care to refer to their own. Not a few of 

I those whom they have known started out 

I 

I apparently well equipped, so far as mental 

I . 

I gifts and opportunities of education and of 

I social position could enable them to go far 
I and ascend high. But one by one they lagged 
^ and suffered themselves to be outstripped 
by others, whom perhaps few suspected at 
the start would reach the first rank before 
them, because they appeared so much infe- 
rior in mental powers to the men whom ulti- 
1 mately they wholly distanced. "Will direction 

/ explains it all. AVhat is the finest mental 
/ .... 

machine in this life without will power? 

In a former age men worshipped the body. 

Homer 's heroes, with the partial exception of 

Ulysses, were worshipped for their bodily 

strength and beauty. The same is still true 

264 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

everywhere among savage tribes. But we 
are living in an age in which mental gifts are 
estimated above all else. The great poet, the 
great artist, the great writer, the great ora- 
tor, are our Goliaths, while there is no end 
to the twaddle about genius. 

But the finest mental machine without the 
will is little else than a machine worked by 
the Afferent. But we are not here to be affer- 
ent. It is a responsibility for any being in 
the universe to have what man has — the Will. 
That majestic endowment constitutes the 
high privilege granted to each man appar- 
ently to test how much the man will make of 
himself. It is clothed with powers which will 
enable him to obtain the greatest of all pos- 
sessions — self-possession. Self-possession 
implies the capacity for self-restraint, self- 
compulsion and self -direction ; and he who has 
these, if he live long enough, can have any 
other possession that he wants. The steady 
discipline of the will saves the mind also by 
obliging it not only to lessen the number of 
265 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

its thoughts, but to improve their quality. 
It is a weak, often a diseased mind which 
thinks hurriedly. Let a man be enfeebled by 
a fever, or by any other cause of exhaustion, 
and he has hard work to keep his mental 
machine from turning out thoughts which 
run to the end of the earth. A rapid flow of 
ideas, indeed, is the sign often of impending 
ruin, as in the approach of maniacal insanity, 
and rarely does that dreadful calamity occur 
except after long antecedent, vicious mental 
habits, in which the mind has been allowed to 
roam with progressively less and less inhibi- 
tion by the will. 

To a less but ever harmful degree men are 
everywhere exposed to the depredations of 
that great thief of life — Desultoriness — for 
desultoriness of thought leads to desultori- 
ness of purpose, of plan, and of action, be- 
cause each of these are soon displaced by 
some other thought or purpose, till the man 
wakes up at last to find his life wasted by his 
ever roving, afferently working mind. 
266 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

Mental waste from too little will direction 
is the greatest waste of the world. Will direc- 
tion calls for effort, but without it the mind 
can easily saunter among attractive scenes of 
its own creation. This is one reason why our 
world is infested with so many dreamers, 
because it is so interesting to imagine an ideal 
society, an ideal state, or an ideal church 
with personally owned air castles included. 
All these are examples of mental processes 
which, when indulged in till they become men- 
tal habits, may end in true mental diseases. 
During the usually gradual onset of that fatal 
form of insanity which ends in general 
paralysis, the mind of the patient is charac- 
teristically occupied with exalted day dreams. 
I have thus recognized paupers in almshouses 
as affected with paresis, not only by the phys- 
ical signs in their eye pupils, etc., but by 
eliciting from them confidential statements 
of what millionaires they were, and what 
great things they were going to do. 

It is therefore one of the healthiest symp- 
267 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

toms in a man to find him always able to 
face facts. This the mind will never do with- 
out the command of the will, because facing 
facts has to be a deliberate, often a disagree- 
able process, requiring much thought ; and no 
mental machine can think long on any sub- 
ject unless it has learned to think by will. 
Deep thought is but another term for pro- 
longed thought. 

Without at first proposing anything of the 
sort, the physiologist now begins to find him- 
self appearing in public in the conventional 
garb of an old sage. From the time of the 
prince who, centuries before Moses was born, 
wrote a book which has been found in an 
Egj^tian tomb, in which he counsels his 
grandson how he could profit, as he himself 
had, by studying the books of the ancients, 
through a long line of Hebrew, Sanscrit, Per- 
sian, Chinese, Greek and Roman worthies, 
mankind has been abundantly lectured about 
wisdom. Some people find these sages rather 
tiresome, because their talk is so monoto- 
268 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

nously alike, while its substance nearly every 
one lias known before. Therefore the physi- 
ologist had better not venture to add himself 
to the number, unless he can show cause by 
having something new to say. All that he 
can claim is that his calling has made clear 
certain facts and principles entering into the 
question which his predecessors might have 
suspected, but without being as well informed 
about the grounds for them as he now is. 
Thus as to wisdom. For practical purposes 
it might be defined as a correct appreciation 
of the relative importance of things, and act- 
ing accordingly. The physiologist divides 
this definition into two very distinct halves, 
according to his recognition of the wide dif- 
ference between the mind and the will. The 
first half, the appreciation of the relative 
importance of things, is done exclusively by 
the mind; and it does it so well and easily 
that any one can try his hand at it. Every- 
body is wise — by fits. The greatest fool of 
one's acquaintance has his sage moments, 
269 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

and, moreover, can deliver correct judgments 
about what others ought to do. But when it 
comes to acting accordingly, it falls to the 
will alone ; and to keep on steadily doing what 
the mind recognizes as the wise thing, such a 
store of will power is needed that but few are 
found who have it. 

The ancient sages long bewailed this failure 
of the will to do the behest of the wise mind; 
but though they clearly recognized the fact, 
they did not know the physiological reason 
for it, which we are yet to allude to in our 
final chapter. 

As we have stated in Chapter I, none 
of them knew what a nervous system was, 
nor what the brain was for. They did not 
know, therefore, any of the following facts 
which have so much bearing upon every spec- 
ulation about man. First, that the conscious 
personality has a material organ to think 
with, which exists in two symmetricial halves. 
It is only one half of this organ, however, 
which can be used for speech, or for recog- 
270 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

nizing or knowing anything which is either 
seen or heard or touched, in the sense of the 
touch which is educated. All acquired hu- 
man endowments, therefore, are acquired by 
a modification of the material comprising the 
speaking half of the brain. This speaking 
half of the brain did not originally have a 
single one of these great functions, not a 
single place in it for them, any more than its 
fellow hemisphere has to the end of life. 
They are all stamped, as it were, each in its 
respective place in the speaking hemisphere, 
by a single creative agency. Had any one of 
the old wise men or philosophers been told 
this, how eagerly would he have asked who 
or what that creative agency was ! We can 
well imagine that when told that it was alone 
the purposive human will which first endowed 
that hemisphere with the great faculty of 
speech, and then with all the rest of these 
great powers, he would have exclaimed : " If 
so, the Will is the greatest fact in man ! ' ' 
The physiologist has something new to say 
271 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

even on the oldest subjects of the moralist. 
"Wlio, like himself, for example, can speak 
with such emphasis on the great subject of 
Habit? Long ago sages said that our habits 
make us. But they said so after their obser- 
vation of external life. The physiologist, 
using the same words, means that our habits 
make our brains inside of us, so that we think, 
talk and act accordingly, and always accord- 
ingly, until the Will steps in and takes the 
fashioning of the human brain in hand. 

But has the Will here entirely displaced 
Habit 1 Alas ! no. The Will is very partial 
in its work on the brain. As it began by dis- 
carding one of the two brains altogether, so 
by analogous neglect it also leaves every man 
with a great part of his mental apparatus 
only a purposeless, mechanically thinking 
thing, which is the mere creature of its habits. 
Then comes to the man an excellent teacher, 
Experience, only, as Carlyle says of him, "a 
teacher good and true, but he demands such 
dreadful high wages!" From Experience 
272 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

the man learns in time that many of his men- 
tal habits are very injurious, and hamper him 
like so many fetters. Wliat can he do about 
it? It is the physiologist who can now tell 
him. Do not expect much from a New Year 
Day's resolutions. Your will can make a new 
man of you, but only after its fashion when 
making anything new in the brain — by reiter- 
ating this same resolution stimulus every sin- 
gle day after New Year 's for the whole year 
at least, just as you learn by it a new lan- 
guage. Brain cells and brain fibers cannot 
learn better ways from preachers, only your 
own untiring Will can do anything with them. 
One other thing the Will can do which is 
of welcome import. To the young, as has 
been said. Nature does nothing but give ; from 
the old she does nothing but take away. If 
men did not become used to the progressive 
losses of old age by sheer compulsion, the 
so-called natural term of life would be for 
little else than sorrow. With old age every- 
thing physical about us becomes progress- 
273 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

ively less usable and enjoyable, as if it were 
decaying by disease. But the Will says to 
Age : ' ' You must spare whatever brain there 
be where I remain in force. Do what you like 
with bone, muscle, or anything else about 
your victims, and you may likewise waste the 
brains of ordinary people, till they become 
more childish than children, but the brain 
where I work shall always remain young!" 

This is all due to the remarkable physio- 
logical power of what is called ' ' interest ' ' to 
resist either bodily exhaustion or decay. If 
a man expended the same amount of muscu- 
lar exertion sawing wood which he does climb- 
ing rocks or wading streams after trout, he 
would faint dead away. But interest is the 
soul of the Will, and the undying ambition of 
many a statesman has kept his brain as strong 
after three score and ten as it ever was be- 
fore. The mind of Gladstone when he was 
over eighty was not like his body at that age, 
but remained still the same mind in all its 
powers which it was at sixty. This was not 
274 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

simply because Gladstone had an exceptional 
mind, for if that were all, his mind would have 
been relatively older at eighty and after than 
it was at sixty, which it never was, but con- 
tinued to the end more than twenty years 
younger than the rest of his frame. 

The importance of demonstrating this prin- 
ciple will excuse our delaying a moment in 
accounting for those interesting physiological 
objects, old misers. A miser is sustained 
throughout life by a special development of 
that incapacity for satisfaction which is one 
of the characteristics of that creature, Man. 
Even man's body shares in this insatiability, 
for whereas the ass is contented with the same 
diet at his master 's crib all his days, it would 
take more knowledge than most people have 
to state correctly where each article on a 
workingman's table comes from, because ev- 
ery region and every climate of the globe 
generally contributes something to that din- 
ner. But a Power working on that will ele- 
ment, which prevents man from knowing 
275 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

what is enough, calls the miser to a lifelong 
mortification of the flesh; to an indifference 
to the scorn of his fellows at his conduct or 
at his raiment ; and to the claims not only of 
his kindred, but even of his own body; for 
rich misers have been known so to hate their 
own lives, for the sake of their master, as to 
die of starvation; and all because that mas- 
ter's voice ever sounds in the miser's ear- 
to him that hath shall be given and he shall 
have more abundantly. In other words, the 
miser's will is unceasingly stimulated by one 
of the most living and powerful of human 
motives, the desire to have. Wall Street is 
no place for dotards or simpletons, and that 
money market has known more than one octo- 
genarian who was as well able to acquire 
from others when he was past eighty as he 
was half a century before. There is a bodily 
window through which the light streams as 
long as the brain is yet young, as is exempli- 
fied in a rich miser of my acquaintance : while 
the rest of him betrays that he is close upon 
276 



PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

ninety, the quick, searching glance of his eye 
reveals that every faculty of his mind is yet 
fully at the disposal of his will. On the other 
hand, let a man retire from business in his 
prime, to lead thereafter a motiveless life, 
and age will change his brain as fast as it 
changes the color of his hair. No lesson for 
advancing years does physiology emphasize 
more strongly than that a man should never 
lose that great motive power of the will — 
interest. 



277 



CHAPTER X 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OP SLEEP 

No consideration of the physical relations of 
the brain to the mind would be complete with- 
out including the separation of the one from 
the other which occurs in sleep. Regarded 
simply as a phenomenon, sleep has been well 
termed the great mystery of life. We should 
not allow the term mystery, however, to be- 
come, as is done by some persons, a signal 
for cessation of all further discussion. From 
its own nature a true mystery, instead of 
ending discussion calls for more of it, because 
a mystery is always something about which 
we know a good deal or else it would be no 
mystery. If we know nothing about a sub- 
ject it is not a mystery to us, whatever else 
it may be. Thus I have heard a fourth dimen- 
sion of space spoken of, but as I know nothing 
of such a dimension, and have not found any 
278 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

one who does, it can be no mystery to me. 
Wliat constitutes a mystery is the unknown 
which is certainly connected with the known. 
A mystery, therefore, is unfinished knowledge 
rather than complete ignorance. Whether 
we can know the rest or not makes no differ- 
ence. It then would remain only an unsolved 
mystery, but in no sense the less a mystery, 
when we are convinced from what we know 
about it that there is more still to know. 

The history of science is a record of many 
a long-standing mystery finally solved. Mean- 
time the process which science follows in 
dealing with mysteries is always the same. 
First, begin by finding out all you know on 
the subject. Do this as thoroughly as possi- 
ble. Then be sure that you do not pass to 
the consideration of the unknown, except 
along lines definitely connected with that 
which is certainly known. In all essentials 
this process corresponds to that of the as- 
tronomer who is trying to find out his dis- 
tance from a heavenly body. He cannot 
279 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

leave this earth, and therefore he begins with 
geometry, and with infinite patience meas- 
ures his base line. Not until he is sure 
of that does he begin as carefully to measure 
the angles of the lines which leave this earth 
from either end of his base line on their way 
to the object in the sky. 

Therefore we begin our investigation of the 
mystery of sleep, by selecting for our base 
line its most fundamental fact, as it appears 
in a question often put by a child — where do 
we go to when we go to sleep ? This is a very 
natural question for a child, because it easily 
recognizes that '^ we " are gone then. Its 
understanding has already grasped the cen- 
tral fact about sleep — absence. 

That being so, we must now take our time 
in considering this first fact, our base line for 
subsequent proceedings. In the first place, 
something must be present, in order that the 
other thing be absent from it; and the pres- 
ent here is the living body, not only complete 
in all its parts, but also in its living attributes 
280 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

and functions. Not one of its component 
cells are changed or gone. The blood circu- 
lates the same, the secretions flow the same, 
the lungs go on exchanging carbonic acid for 
oxygen, and all the processes of nutrition 
are as active as ever. 

But the completeness of that which is pres- 
ent only accentuates the disappearance of 
that which is absent. Whatever other ques- 
tions may be raised, the primary and certain 
truth is that in natural sleep, the conscious 
personality in us takes its departure from 
the body without leaving a trace behind. It 
may return gradually and partially as in 
dreams, but that is then not sleep. In true, 
healthy, sound sleep the body is as devoid as 
a bronze or stone statue of either conscious- 
ness or mind. That it is still a warm, living 
body does not alter the case, because while a 
living body can be awakened and a statue 
cannot, awakening is the opposite of sleep, 
and hence throws no light whatever on what 
sleep itself is. 

281 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

The marvel of sleep is lost upon us owing 
to the unfortunate peculiarity that our ability 
to wonder is soon abolished by mere repeti- 
tion. Because the recurrence of sleep is as 
certain and regular as sunset itself, it does 
not occur to us to wonder at it, or to ask what 
it all means. Really to appreciate what a 
strange thing sleep is in a race of intelligent 
beings, we may have recourse to our imagi- 
nation, and picture another world whose in- 
habitants are mentally just like ourselves, but 
whose ordinary conscious life is continuous, 
and sleep therefore wholly unknown to them. 
Now should a single one of their fellows hap- 
pen to fall asleep in our fashion, he would 
certainly fill them all with amazement, if not 
with terror. To their minds, an individual 
who could virtually go out of existence for 
some hours, and then return just as if noth- 
ing had happened, would be about as uncanny 
and alarming an object as the apparition of 
an unmistakable ghost would be to us. 

But the greatest perturbation of all which 
,282 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

this sleeper would occasion would be among 
their philosophers, because he would consti- 
tute a phenomenon which contradicted their 
whole science of the Keal. With less diffi- 
culty than our own philosophers, who always 
feel uneasy when sleep is mentioned, their 
philosophers had long demonstrated that the 
one certainty of certainties among them was 
their own conscious selves, that Ego which is 
always there. As with us, every other exist- 
ence is only relative to this first certainty, 
which is based upon personal consciousness. 
But this new sleeper among them would be 
a specimen of a being who can be alternately 
vividly conscious at one time, and utterly non- 
conscious at another, and whose Ego, there- 
fore, could both be and not be by turns ! 

To return now to our own earth, and to our 
body of philosophers, we may first allude 
to the theme which has long chiefly occupied 
their attention, namely, Ontology, or the 
Science of Being. In their discussions on the 
nature of Being two great terms are con- 
283 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tinually employed ; namely, Subject, to denote 
that which thinks, and Object, or that which 
is thought about. The Subject also feels 
and perceives, while the Object is that which 
is the occasion of feeling and of perceiv- 
ing by the Subject. The longest debate 
has been on the relations of these two ele- 
ments of our being to each other. One 
school of philosophers maintains that they 
are absolutely distinct, the Subject being the 
central Ego, and the Object being essentially 
the external Non-Ego. The other school 
maintains that the two are really identical, 
Object being but a phase of Subject. 

Meantime the appeal on both sides is ex- 
clusively to facts of consciousness. The first 
school relies upon the immediate perception 
by the Subject that the Object, for example, 
a stone, is no part of it, never was and never 
can be. The other school, beginning with the 
illustrations of sound and of pain as things 
which have no objective, but only subjective, 
existence, then goes on to demonstrate that 
284 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

everything exists only as a state of conscious- 
ness. Apart from a conscious mind, nothing 
has any real existence in or of itself. This 
was Bishop Berkeley's celebrated doctrine. 

It may be remarked here that Democritus 
of Abdera, circa 430 b.c.^ was the doctrinal 
ancestor of Berkeley, His teaching contains 
the germ of all subsequent speculations of the 
kind, enunciated in his famous saying: 
'' Man lives plunged in a world of illusion 
and of deceptive forms which the vulgar take 
for reality. To tell the truth, we do not know 
anything." The late Professor Clitford 
maintained a theory about mind and its re- 
lations to matter, which, to use his own words, 
** Is not merely a speculation, but is a result 
to which all the greater minds which have 
studied this question in the right way 
(namely, in Clifford's way) have gradually 
been approximating for a long time." This 
theory is that mental phenomena and physi- 
cal phenomena, although apparently diverse, 
are really identical. This view, though not 
285 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

in all its aspects the same, yet approximates 
to the doctrine of Hegel, that there can be no 
existence possible of matter or of motion, ex- 
cept as standing in relation to mind. 

All we can say to this is that by the time 
a man who, while looking at that interesting 
body, the moon, comes through philosophiz- 
ing to believe that it is a special phase of him- 
self, because being an object it exists only in 
his consciousness, he must then be intellectu- 
ally drunk ! 

It is related of a certain German thinker 
that his cogitations led him into such a sea 
of doubts, that he began to doubt his own ex- 
istence. At last his feet touched bottom on 
one unquestionable fact, viz. : That he could 
not doubt that he doubted! But, unfortu- 
nately for this reassurance, it also would go 
when he lay his head upon his pillow at 
night, for in his sleep he would not know that 
he had ever doubted. Doubting is a fact of 
consciousness. But so is every other fact 
which metaphysicians go by. They all con- 
286 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

sist of mental processes in the waking state. 
But in sleep all mental processes, with every- 
thing pertaining to them, apparently cease, 
and so completely that all contrasts and dis- 
tinctions belonging to conscious life equally 
disappear. A philosopher and a simpleton, 
a wise man and a fool, and likewise an inno- 
cent child and a murderer, a saint and a 
criminal, are all alike when they are all fast 
asleep. 

Sleep, therefore, is a something which 
abolishes both the Subject and the Object of 
the metaphysician before his very eyes ; and 
along with them every other thing that he has 
talked about, whether principles of thought 
or principles of ethics. 

This undoubted accompaniment of sleep, 
then, raises the question whether our base 
line itself be correct or not. Does sleep tes- 
tify to the absence of the conscious person- 
ality from the body, or rather to what is 
really quite different from absence, namely, 
to extinction of the personality? Instead of 
287 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

the child 's question, Where do we go when we 
go to sleep? the other question, also some- 
times asked by a child, may be nearer the 
mark, Wliere does the fire go when it goes 
out? We may then liken our conscious life 
to the light of a candle which is periodically 
extinguished to prevent the candle, which is 
the analogue of the body, from being burned 
up too fast. Every time this candle is lit, it 
gives off its light at the expense of the body, 
so that in time the candle itself is used up; 
and after a few fitful flashes in its socket, it 
ends in final darkness. 

Starting, therefore, with Extinction as our 
base, we will follow our lines of inference 
therefrom to note whether they will converge 
to some definite conclusion. At one end of 
our base line we have the fact, which is doubt- 
less true, that sleep is due to a physical bodily 
necessity or condition. Moreover we have 
more than one example of purely physical 
conditions inducing the chief element in sleep, 
namely, unconsciousness, such as in apoplexy, 
288 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

or from a blow on the head, or from brain 
poisoning, as by chloroform; and though 
these states differ in many particulars from 
natural sleep, yet they suffice to show that the 
link between consciousness and the brain is a 
physical one, or else physical agents would 
not sever it. The inference, therefore, seems 
probable that as physical conditions of the 
brain extinguish consciousness, so physical 
conditions there create it. 

But unfortunately this line of inference 
based upon extinction cannot be made to pass 
in the neighborhood of demonstrated facts. 
To begin with, it is not the whole body, but 
only a part of the body, namely, the nervous 
system, which is connected with the conscious 
personality, and not the whole nervous sys- 
tem but only the brain, and in turn not the 
whole brain but only the one of the two hemi- 
spheres in which speech is located, which 
when awake either subjectively thinks or rec- 
ognizes objects. We have gone all over this 
subject before, and need not waste any more 
289 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

words upon it. The brain itself neither 
makes a word nor forms an idea. All words 
and all knowledge are put in the brain, and 
arranged there for use, like so many books 
on their brain shelves by the brain's libra- 
rian. Wliere he goes to, when he locks this 
library up and leaves for the night, we do 
not know; but one thing is certain: that not 
one of its books made itself or put itself 
where it properly is. 

But the inferences drawn at the other end 
of this base line are worse yet for going all 
astray. Extinction is extinction; therefore, 
after the shortest nap our whole conscious 
selves have to be made all anew! The com- 
parison to a re-lit candle is altogether too 
simple to fit the case, for our being is infi- 
nitely more than a flame. The surest reali- 
ties of being cannot actively exist, then be an- 
nihilated, and then come into active existence 
again, like passing flashes of light. How 
much of our conscious life consists in memo- 
ries and the use of memories ! Every word 
290 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

we hear, read or utter, exists as memorized 
symbols in the cells of our speech centers, 
and it took a long time to put them there. 
A night's sleep certainly does not and cannot 
obliterate them, nor wipe out anything else 
the brain has acquired. We have gained in 
our years settled convictions, strong motives 
and living sentiments, all too deeply seated 
to come by day and go by night, or ever ap- 
proach extinction while we live. It is these 
abiding elements in our conscious being 
which make us true persons. To admit that 
all of them can be and not be between 
waking and sleeping would be the end of all 
reality. If we are certain of anything, it is 
that we are. The old saying — cogito, ergo 
sum, I think, therefore I am — is not to be 
disproved by brief lapses into unthinking 
sleep. 

But this theory runs counter also to one of 

the most striking facts about personality, 

namely, Continuity. Change is the great 

word descriptive of this strange life of ours. 

291 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

As old age approaches, memory can bring 
back picture after picture of our former 
selves, in early childhood, in youth and in 
each year thereafter, with changes upon 
changes in everything — except in one thing. 
Through them all, whether taking place in us 
or about us, we ivere never anybody else. It 
was I who was a child, and it is the same I 
who is now. That I has never been other 
than what it is, and certainly never yet ex- 
tinct. Hence the extinction theory of sleep 
leads us to absurdity as its conclusion ; or, in 
other words, to a mental Nowhere. 

Let us, therefore, in our quest now turn and 
ask what physiology has to say on the sub- 
ject. That is eminently proper, because in 
all matters connected with bodily life, it is 
the province of physiology to occupy itself 
with the question. What for! All other de- 
tails about structure or place are considered 
by the physiologist as simply contributing to 
solving his question, Wliat is the purpose 
achieved? Sleep is a great factor in human 
292 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

life, about one-third of its allotted duration 
being spent in sleep ; but what is sleep for? 

Many persons may think that they can an- 
swer this question otf-hand, without any help 
from the physiologist. After a hard day's 
work, farmer and mechanic know that their 
fatigued muscles need rest. Another who 
has been working his brain for hours finds 
that his thoughts are growing dull and sleepy. 
With another an exciting day ends in a sense 
of weariness in all his nerves, those of the eye 
and of the ear especially. Therefore it is 
plain that muscles cannot be worked forever, 
nor brain nor nerves be exercised unceas- 
ingly ; and hence that is what the rest of sleep 
is for. 

But such an answer is none the less a 
mistake because part of it is true. In fact, 
the demonstration of what the particular 
mistake in this answer is will take us a long 
way toward recognizing what in truth is the 
real significance of sleep. 

First, as to the muscles. Sleep is needed 
293 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

by muscles not because they are muscles do- 
ing work. Muscular work, as such, does not 
tire muscles, though they have to work unin- 
terruptedly not for hours only, but for years. 
Muscular work consists in pulling at some- 
thing, and then relaxing so as to pull again. 
For this purpose all muscles which are at- 
tached to bones are composed of lines of 
muscle cells, which contract in the direction 
of their attachments, and by shortening the 
muscle produce the pull. All such muscles 
under the microscope have just the same ap- 
pearance, are constructed alike, and always 
perform just the same kind of work. Now 
the diaphragm is a great muscle, and is both 
constructed and does its work just as any 
muscle in arm or leg does its work. Indeed, 
it has to perform more muscular work than 
any muscle in the limbs ever does or could 
do. But it would be disastrous if ever it got 
so tired by its work that it called for rest. 
It is the same in the powerful array of the 
other chest -and abdominal -muscles which 
294 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

carry on our respiration, for the combined 
muscular work spent in breathing has been 
estimated as equal to raising five hundred 
pounds an inch with each deep inspiration. 
So great is the work performed by these mus- 
cles, that most of our power-making food is 
consumed in their unceasing exercise, in 
all which, fortunately, none of them ever need 
sleep. It has been erroneously supposed 
that these muscles get all the rest in breath- 
ing which they need, because they rhythmi- 
cally rest between inspiration and expira- 
tion. But let any one try to move his arms 
up and down sawing wood, twenty-four times 
a minute, which is the pace of ordinary 
breathing, while standing, and he will find 
that his pauses between in that rhyth- 
mical process did not amount to any rest at 
all. 

The conclusion from these physiological 
facts is important, namely, that it is some- 
thing else beside their work, and essentially 
different from it, which tires and exhausts 
295 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

muscles to the degree sometimes of destroy- 
ing them. 

Still more significant are the facts about 
nerve cells and the expenditure of their 
energy, which is equivalent in its way to the 
expenditure of power by muscles in their 
work. In contrast with the action of muscles 
which is visible and uniform, the action of 
nerve cells and of their prolongations in 
nerve fibers is both invisible and extraordi- 
narily multiform. 

We can judge what their action is only by 
cutting the nerve fiber or excising the cell, 
or by stimulating these with various irri- 
tants. But the result of such experiments 
conveys the impression of power, or of the 
transfer of energy in nervous tissue much 
more than any manifestations of the kind in 
muscular tissue. Take a powerful muscle and 
simply sever its motor nerve, and the muscle 
hangs flaccid and paralyzed. All that strong 
work in the muscle was elicited by a current 
of energy coming down that nerve. So the 
296 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

whole powerful meclianism of the muscles 
of respiration would instantly and forever 
cease to work if a small nail were driven into 
the respiratory center in the medulla oblon- 
gata. But the medulla has to regulate the 
beating heart as well, and it sends its nerves 
to follow every secondary artery, down to the 
smallest, to regulate them all with a grip 
which they must ever obey. These are ex- 
amples of only a part of the work which the 
power centers in the medulla are constantly 
performing without cessation throughout life. 
A moment's sleep by them would mean the 
sleep of death. Hence neither nerve cells nor 
nerve fibers, as such, need rest in their 
work ; and as with muscles, it must be some- 
thing other than their work which can fatigue 
them. 

No one can fail, therefore, to be deeply im- 
pressed by the revelation of what the signifi- 
cance of sleep is, when it clearly appears that 
it is only the play upon it of the conscious- 
ness, and especially the highest function of 
297 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

consciousness, the Will, that fatigues or ex- 
hausts with weariness any part of the living 
body. The muscles of the thumb and fore- 
finger are small indeed, either in size or in 
power, compared with the diaphragm; but 
often both the nerves of these muscles and 
the muscles themselves are wholly ruined in 
writer's palsy by too continuous work done 
by them at the command of the will. As soon 
as the will orders the muscles of the arms 
and legs to work under its direction, that 
work becomes labor. Ere long they cry for 
rest and must have it or fatal exhaustion will 
follow. 

Therefore it is not natural work, whether 
nervous or muscular, but only conscious work 
which wears. In proportion to the continu- 
ousness with which the conscious will enters 
into any bodily action is the resultant fatigue. 
"Wriiat does this remarkable fact mean? Be- 
cause instead of missing the presence of this 
law of being in the operations of the brain 
itself, when thoughts are passing through it, 
298 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

we then meet with some of its most striking 
illustrations. Allow the brain to think as it 
pleases, and it is much pleased to do so. It 
enjoys all the afferent impressions of the 
senses and thinks fast and easily. It roves 
from thought to thought, and from fancy to 
fancy, as lightly as the butterfly passes from 
flower to flower. Mental butterflying, in fact, 
is a good descriptive term of the thinking of 
many men and women. But the moment the 
will calls the mind from its pasturing, and, 
putting its bridle on, says, '■ ' Now go my way, 
and think exclusively as I direct you," the 
sense of effort is immediate and fatigue be- 
gins. Many persons, indeed, not only cannot 
think long by will, that is, think efferently, 
but they cannot even think long afferently by 
will, as, for example, in the passive mental 
exercise of listening. If they listen at all, 
they must have a constant variety of sensa- 
tion. This constitutes one of the signs of 
mental degeneracy of our day, namely, the 
craving for that low, afferent form of men- 
299 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tality which is ministered to by what is prop- 
erly termed the sensational. 

Owing to its direct relations to life, physi- 
ologists have labored long in their researches 
into the genesis of fatiguOo The Leipzic 
school especially has almost subordinated 
other themes of physiology to this investiga- 
tion, by the most exhaustive experiments with 
numerous ingenious devices to ascertain and 
to measure how muscles are acted upon by 
stimuli, and how they are exhausted by them. 
But it should be noted that the only stimuli 
with which they can experiment are them- 
selves unnatural and foreign to this living tis- 
sue itself. A prick of a pin; a pinch with a 
forceps ; an irritating acid ; or their most com- 
monly used agent, an electrical current, are 
none of them the natural stimuli of either 
nerve or muscle. In fact, cartilage is a bet- 
ter conductor of an electrical current than is 
a nerve. But the inference is that these stim- 
uli can exhaust a muscle, because they are un- 
natural to it. Natural stimuli are like those 
300 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

wliicli descend from the medulla to the dia- 
phragm muscle, and which never exhaust it. 
Nor do any other stimuli from the medulla 
cause fatigue, because they all have the char- 
acter of being spontaneous, or what is termed 
automatic. 

But a will stimulus, called a voluntary 
stimulus, is necessarily not automatic, and 
hence distinctly different from automatic 
stimulus. Here, therefore, is the secret of 
the inevitable fatigue which so-called volun- 
tary activity sooner or later occasions. The 
inference, therefore, seems certain that the 
consciousness, and particularly its most 
vivid form, the active will, is essentially for- 
eign both to the muscular and to the nervous 
systems of the body, including the brain 
itself. If the conscious will were not foreign, 
but were natural, its exercise would not cause 
fatigue. Hence it must be something super- 
added to the body as an extra burden for the 
body to carry. 

Such being the case, the conclusion follows 
301 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

that the necessity for sleep arises from the 
fact that the consciousness bears the relation 
to the body of the rider to his horse. While 
the rider directs the horse in all his ways, he 
is neither the horse nor a constant part of the 
horse, but so different from him that it is 
his added weight which wears the animal out, 
and makes it necessary for this rider to dis- 
mount at stated intervals and leave the horse 
wholly alone. This horse can get along per- 
fectly well without this rider, and then not 
know what fatigue means. But the separate 
load of the consciousness is so far from being 
light, that no other provision is possible than 
its complete withdrawal from brain and body 
until they are both sufficiently rested. All 
animals, therefore, require sleep in propor- 
tion to their possession of consciousness, but 
more than all man, because in him conscious- 
ness attains to its highest level, and activity 
is the purposive will. 

But what becomes of the personality itself 
when it thus withdraws? We have seen that 
302 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

it must still exist in its entirety during sleep 
as well as before sleep. One difficulty, of 
course, is inherent in the problem, namely, 
that the personality itself is always invisible. 
A living brain when exposed, though it then 
be conscious, shows no more evidence of the 
mind which is there than does any other 
bodily thing. The nearest we ever come to 
seeing this Indweller is when it makes the 
eye flash. All that we can say is that our 
consciousness in its relation to the mind seems 
somewhat like a window which is but rarely 
opened wide. Whole trains of thoughts may 
go on within us with the light of this window 
scarcely falling upon them, except at the final 
conclusions. Unconscious cerebration is 
what physiologists call this kind of thinking. 
But does this kind of thinking go on while the 
window of consciousness is wholly closed dur- 
ing sleep? There are some facts of experi- 
ence which seem to point that way. People 
often go to bed in a state of much perplexity 
or indecision about certain matters, and then 
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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

rise in the morning mucli as if they had taken 
some friend's advice while they were asleep, 
which puts things in an entirely new light. 
Others say that they want to sleep over a 
question before they will decide it. There is 
nothing like sleep for promoting judicious- 
ness. On the other hand, some anecdotes are 
told which appear to show that occasionally 
the personality does steal behind the closed 
window of consciousness in sleep, and then 
having the mental machine all to itself, 
makes it work even more effectively than in 
the waking estate. Such occurrences, how- 
ever, are too few to establish any general 
principle. 

Two such instances I can personally vouch 
for. Wliile at college I was told by a fellow 
student that his room-mate, named Childs, 
sat up with him late one night working at a 
difficult problem in mathematics. Failing to 
solve it, Childs rubbed his slate clean, put out 
the light, and retired to bed in much vexa- 
tion. Long after midnight his chum was 
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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

awakened by a light, when he saw Childs in 
his nightdress, busy with his slate. He then 
called to Childs to desist from such untimely 
work, but not receiving any answer, turned 
over to sleep. The next morning while both 
were dressing, Childs complained that his 
night's rest had not refreshed him. " I am 
not surprised," replied his friend, " when 
you got up about three o'clock and went at 
that problem again ! ' ' Childs answered that 
he had done nothing of the kind, when, glanc- 
ing at the table, he was astonished to find his 
slate covered with the problem all correctly 
worked out. 

The other instance was that of a British 
consul in Syria, who afterwards rose high 
in the diplomatic service. He had been a dili- 
gent student of Arabic, to fit himself for the 
duties of his position, when one night he tried 
to compose a letter to a Lebanon Emir. 
Arabic etiquette requires that such letters 
should testify to the accomplishments of the 
writer in the selection of a multitude of con- 
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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

ventional compliments corresponding to the 
rank of the person addressed. Wlien, beside 
these, the matter in hand had to be dealt with 
very diplomatically, the consul did little that 
evening but tear up one letter after another 
which he had written, as unsatisfactory, till 
finally he stopped in despair, and went to bed 
blessing all Arabic composition in general. 
The next morning he found on his desk a 
fresh letter which he must have penned, as it 
was in his handwriting, and so well worded, 
that he forthwith dispatched it. 

But to revert to the subject of fatigue. Be- 
cause a thing is as it is, we cease either to 
inquire or to reason about it. But why cannot 
we carry on all the activities of our conscious 
life, as we do those of our bodily life, without 
fatigue ? Why do all voluntary acts, whether 
muscle, nerve or brain be used in them, lead 
to such exhaustion that sleep becomes neces- 
sary ? Regarded by itself human fatigue sup- 
plies one of the strongest foundation facts 
for a philosophy of pessimism. It is all very 
306 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

well to speak of the dignity of labor. But 
labor is a curse. No rhetorical halo cast 
about it in modern democratic communities 
when manual labor is spoken of, can really 
hide its intrinsic odiousness. The other great 
truth, that idleness is for man a worse curse, 
does not alter the fact that labor remains the 
heavy, weary burden of human life. Muscle 
work is the commonest and the simplest, and 
hence can be done also by the ox. Therefore 
it is cheap, its pay is low, and the man who 
can do no other work is always poor. But 
for man this animal work is so hateful, that 
nothing but stern compulsion keeps him at 
it, as with the great majority of our race, 
simply to get enough to eat. But brain work 
is harder yet, because the will is then so much 
more engaged. The only compensation is 
that it commands higher wages, because it 
costs more to produce it, and hence is more 
costly. But so difficult is this work that no 
form of labor is more often shirked. Eeally 
active brain workers are few, owing to the 
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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

steadiness of purpose which such labor re- 
quires. The self-reproaches which life retro- 
spects so commonly bring come from the 
recognition that the best course was so often 
not followed because another was at the time 
easier. But human excellence, be it mental 
or moral, is never made easy of attainment 
for us. We may have every such excellence, 
if we will only pay for it with its equivalent 
in grievous toil. Therefore it is to this curse 
of labor that so much of human failure and 
sorrow can be ascribed. Wliile the sun 
shines, mankind carries its pathetic burden 
of work till night comes with its sleep, which 
allows it for a space to forget all its woes. 
But has this temporary oblivion any other 
physiological purpose than to permit the bur- 
den to be lifted again? 

Once more, we repeat that it is no answer 
to say that fatigue is the simple result of the 
expenditure of our bodily forces, a chemical 
result of the chemical processes which would 
consume the candle of life if kept too con- 
308 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

tinuously burning, for we have seen that this 
is not true. Heart and lungs with their work- 
ing muscles and energizing nerves burn up 
more in their work than any other bodily 
things do, but fatigue never interferes with 
nor follows upon their active chemical proc- 
esses. Hence sleep may be termed Nature's 
great anesthetic for the pain of labor, and re- 
garded as a great blessing, just as chloro- 
form is a blessing for what otherwise would 
be unendurable. But while we speak of sleep 
as our sweet restorer, we must not forget that 
the living body itself never needs this re- 
storer till Something different from it begins 
to stir the brain with its activities. 

We have dealt with this subject of fatigue 
because of its physiological import, for noth- 
ing could witness more plainly to the sepa- 
rate and external nature of the consciousness 
and of the purposive will, than this virtual 
protest of the physical frame against them 
both, but particularly against the will. It 
need not be wondered at, therefore, that to 
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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

many thoughtful minds both in ancient and 
modern times, sleep has appeared as one of 
the strongest of evidences that the soul is not 
of the body, but distinct from it. Both body 
and soul can exist apart from each other. In 
the sleeping state the body is seen left en- 
tirely to itself. Compared with the waking 
state the difference is marvelous. Is that 
succeeding amazing difference which comes 
at the instant of waking, a thing of physical 
or chemical origin? Could the body create 
the man in that moment! Common sense, 
which is the safe and balanced sum of all 
sense, answers that such a supposition is 
nonsense. Magnetism and iron are associ- 
ated for mighty working in a dynamo, but 
only while the electrical current is coursing 
through the iron. Then, in a twinkling, the 
iron is only iron. Does the iron itself make 
the magnetism every time the connection 
recurs ? 

Sleep and awakening have always made 
mankind doubt the fact of human extinction 
310 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

by death. In the remotest past, when the 
race was represented by the primitive cave 
dwellers, they buried, with their dead, 
weapons for the chase, food and food utensils, 
and even for the children their little toys. A 
minority of men may now attempt to ascribe 
this conviction, which is found everywhere 
and in all times, merely to human aspiration. 
It is true that the human heart has much 
to say and to ask, when loved ones lie dea(J, 
but it is the sure fact of sleep which makes 
hope so reasonable, by giving the lie to every 
doctrine of extinction. We have already 
tried to picture a world whose inhabitants, 
though otherwise like ourselves, had never 
seen any one sleep, and what a number of 
questions such a sight would occasion among 
them. But the sight of one dead would be to 
them unspeakably awful, because, unlike us, 
they had never been prepared beforehand by 
any example of a real going away, followed 
by a real coming back. 
Yet for us the only serious difference as 
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BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

regards personality between sleep and death, 
is that after death there is no return. In 
both states the absence of the personality is 
complete, but does the failure to return make 
the same absence then mean extinction when 
it never did so in sleej^? No one really be- 
lieves it, though one may say he does. What 
is generic cannot be got out of us by logic, 
or by anything else, and a belief in a here- 
after is as generic as mankind, as the faculty 
of speech itself. The men who nearly sixty 
centuries ago built those tremendous tombs, 
the Pyramids, cared more about the other 
world than this. To judge him by what he ac- 
complished in every direction, unaided by for- 
eign teaching or by inheritance from the past, 
the old Egyptian of the Fourth Dynasty was 
no fool. Some would say that his solicitude 
about the future life was because his priest 
frightened him; but then the question im- 
mediately arises. How came the priest to have 
such power to scare him? As an historical 
fact, disbelief in the unseen world does not 
312 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

prevail among nations until they begin to 
rot. In Greece it was not in the age of 
Marathon, or of Aristides, that such infidels 
abounded; but in the wretched times when 
only rhetoricians and sophists flourished. 
When Eome was all iron, the Eoman was a 
devout man; but in the slavish days of a 
Tiberius and a Domitian, he became an Epi- 
curean. The brain does not work well with 
the blood reaching it after coursing through 
gangrenous tissues. 

The lack of any returning traveler to tell 
of the world beyond, caused primitive and 
ancient peoples to picture it each for them- 
selves. But as the imagination can do noth- 
ing but reproduce earthly scenes, so the 
Egyptian had another Egypt; the Greek, 
Elysian fields; and the American Indian, 
happy hunting grounds. On the other hand, 
with the dark grave as its portal, an associa- 
tion of gloom often remained inseparable 
from thoughts of the abode of the dead. 
Homer depicts the wise Ulysses descending 
313 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

there and finding it a cheerless place, where 
even the greatest departed heroes live only as 
weak, mournful specters, so that Achilles 
tells his old friend, " I would rather be one 
of earth's plowmen, working for another 
poor, impoverished man, than to rule all the 
shades of the dead! " 

But the light which modern science has 
shed upon the facts of life can suggest, too, 
when duly pondered, quite different trains 
of thought, or, if you please, of mental pic- 
tures of another life than this awaiting us. 
The mental and moral equipment of man 
seem sufficient for any future life, however 
limitless its conditions. Locality, which held 
such an exclusive place in ancient concep- 
tions, can be wholly subordinated now to 
questions about states of being. We can now 
conceive of a body no longer made of the most 
temporary forms of that matter which is 
itself passing away, but fashioned to be a 
dynamic body, a body of power which need 
not shrink, as here, from the heavy burden 
314 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

of will. There should be no night there, for 
sleep will not be needed, when purpose does 
not weary nor its exercise fatigue. Then as 
to the mind : we know that at present the word 
Enough is only understood, but not experi- 
enced, by man, and the opportunities for 
knowledge in a universe would not be too 
many for his desires. But above all rises a 
conception of a perfection of being, when the 
will so responds to the highest motives alone, 
that there could be no conflict with lower 
motives forever ! 

Often we fail to appreciate all which death 
implies when it comes at the end of a long, 
wasting disease, marked by progressive en- 
feeblement of the bodily powers and by cloud- 
ing of the mind. At such times it may simply 
appear as a physical process, like a candle 
slowly burning itself out. But it is quite 
otherwise when a man, it may be an excep- 
tional man as regards mind, altogether leaves 
us in an instant. How are we then stunned 
at being thus confronted with the whole mys- 
315 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

tery of our being! There is nothing so im- 
pressive as this : a living embodiment of 
personal mental power before us one moment, 
and in another gone from us forever. How- 
ever it may have been with us before, the 
Here and the Hereafter cannot now be 
divided in our minds, for the one follows too 
quickly upon the other to let us believe that 
there is no link between them. 

One event of this kind, which happened on 
a public occasion in New York, will not be 
forgotten to the end of his days by any one 
who witnessed it. Our whole great country, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was then agi- 
tated by the discussion of the great human 
question, '\Yhat is Money? A coin may be 
one of the smallest things that man makes, but 
however small it testifies to ideas of value 
utterly beyond the comprehension of any 
other animal than man, because in that ma- 
terial thing are represented the existence of 
law, fixed institutions and society as it ad- 
justs' the relations of individuals to one 
316 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

another. So entirely ideal, however, is 
money, that on a piece of paper which may be 
burnt with a match may be printed what 
would make it more valuable than any other 
one thing on earth. But whatever money's 
outward form, it must always represent its 
equivalent in human labor. Nothing but that 
gives its value to money. Coin or paper pro- 
duced without that costly antecedent cannot 
be money, however much men may insist that 
it is. But because money itself has no exist- 
ence outside of agreement between men, so 
good faith in that agreement is its sole basis. 
So sure is this law that every social tie in a 
great country may be endangered by a loss 
of faith in what purports to be its money. It 
requires, therefore, great mental grasp to 
perceive clearly through all the incalculably 
complex relations of civilized life what a mo- 
mentous meaning attaches to the word Credit. 
With credit gone, everything goes, because 
men no longer know how to deal with each 
other. A country's minister of finance, 
317 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

therefore, should be above all others one who 
can quickly see what imperils its public 
credit, and just how it does so. 

On January 29th, 1891, the New York 
Board of Trade and of Transportation held 
its annual dinner. Representing, as it did, 
the greatest business interests of the land, 
and with the whole country stirred by the 
financial question, it invited the then Secre- 
tary of the Treasury of the United States to 
address it on that occasion. Every one was 
eagerly waiting for what he would then say, 
because he was a statesman long and widely 
known as a man not only of great ability, but 
of the highest personal character. After 
holding many public positions in his own 
western State of Minnesota, he was elected 
to the national House of Representatives, 
where for ten years he held the responsible 
position of Chairman of the Financial Com- 
mittee of the House, that of Ways and Means. 
In that position he actively contended for, 
and finally won, an object which had strongly 
318 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SLEEP 

enlisted his Christian sympathies, by a bill 
directed against the great abuses by Govern- 
ment agents in their dealing with the Indian 
tribes. He then served for ten years in the 
United States Senate, once losing his seat in 
that body because he would not sacrifice his 
convictions on the money question, as did 
others among his party's leaders in his State. 
He then served twice as a Cabinet officer, as 
Secretary of the Treasury. Nor were his 
hearers now disappointed with what he had 
to say. After a masterly review of the whole 
subject of what money is and always must 
be to make it money, he characteristically 
brushed aside all other issues to insist on the 
moral aspects of good faith as the one vital 
principle underlying everything financial. 
The words which he then spoke were printed 
day after day on the front pages of many of 
the most prominent newspapers in the 
country, and served to determine thousands 
of men how to vote when the time came. 
These words were : "As poison in the blood 
319 



BRAIN AND PERSONALITY 

permeates arteries, veins, nerves, brain and 
heart, and speedily brings paralysis or death, 
so does a debased or fluctuating currency per- 
meate all the arteries of trade, paralyze all 
kinds of business, and bring disaster to all 
classes of people. It is as impossible for 
commerce to flourish with such an instrument, 
as it is for the human body to grow strong 
and vigorous with a deadly poison lurking in 
the blood." 

As he uttered these last words — *' in the 
blood " — his tongue faltered, he sank to the 
floor, and in a moment of time he was gone ! 
What was it that happened to William Win- 
dom, the man who had always been a leader 
wherever he was ; an influential legislator, an 
active philanthropist, and an eminent states- 
man, whose great services to his country at a 
most critical time will never be forgotten? 

Human philosophy and human science 

hardly know what to say in reply. A higher 

voice than either of theirs answers : ' ' He fell 

asleep! for after sleep cometh awakening! " 

320 



